by Spider
“No,” I went on finally, “that’s a lie. I won’t try to claim that. But we can do it without you if it can be done at all. Norrey and I have personal reasons for going—but what do you people want to throw away a planet for?”
There was a glutinous silence. I had done my best; Norrey had nothing to add. I watched four blank, expressionless faces and waited.
At last Linda stirred. “We’ll solve zero-gee childbirth,” she said with serene confidence, and added, “when we have to,” a second later.
Tom had forgotten his discomfort. He looked long at Linda, smiling with puffy lips amid his burst capillaries, and said to her, “I was raised in New York. I’ve known cities all my life. I never realized how much tension was involved in city life until I stayed at your family’s home for a week. And I never realized how much I hated that tension until I noticed how much I was getting to dread having to go dirtside again. You only realize how stiff your neck and shoulders were when someone rubs them out for you.” He touched her cheek with blood-purple fingernails. “It will be a long time before we have to put a lock on our airlock. Sure, we’ll have a child someday—and we won’t have to teach it how to adapt to a jungle.”
She smiled, and took his purple fingers in her own. “We won’t have to teach it how to walk.”
“In zero gee,” Raoul said meditatively, “I’m taller.” I thought he meant the few centimeters that every spine stretches in free fall, but then he said, “In zero gee nobody is short.”
By golly, he was right. “Eye-level” is a meaningless term in space; consequently so is height.
But his voice was speculative; he had not committed himself yet.
Harry sucked beer from a bulb, belched, and studied the ceiling. “On my mind. For a long time. This adapting stuff. I could work all year insteada half. See a job through for once. Was thinking of doing it anyway.” He looked at Raoul. “Don’t figure I’ll miss the ladies any.”
Raoul met his eyes squarely. “Me either,” he said, and this time his voice held commitment.
Light dawned in the cerebral caverns, and my jaw hung down. “Jesus Christ in a p-suit!”
“It’s just a blind spot, Charlie,” Linda said compassionately.
She was right. It has nothing to do with wisdom or maturity or how observant I am. It’s just a personal quirk, a blind spot: I never will learn to notice love when it’s under my nose.
“Norrey,” I said accusingly. “You know I’m an idiot, why didn’t you tell me? Norrey?”
She was sound asleep.
And all four of them were laughing like hell at me, and after a second I had to laugh too. Any man who does not know himself a fool is a damned fool; any man who tries to hide it is a double-damned fool, for he is alone. Together, we laughed, diminishing my foolishness to a shared thing, and Norrey stirred and half-smiled in her sleep.
“All right,” I said when I could get my breath, “someone for all and all for someone. I won’t try to fight the weather. I love you all, and will be glad of your company. Tom, you stretch out and get some sleep yourself; Raoul, get the light; the four of us’ll go get briefed and come back for you and Norrey, Tom; we’ll pack your comic books and your other tunic. You still mass around seventy-two, right?” I bent and kissed Norrey’s forehead. “Let’s roll it.”
3
STARSEED
Chapter 1
It was a week after that day that we next found an opportunity to all talk together—and we spent the first hour and a half of our opportunity in relative silence. A week locked in a steel can with many strangers had turned out to be even less fun than a comparable period with as many students. Most of these strangers were our employers, the other two were our Space Command keepers, none of them were our subordinates and nearly all of them were temperamentally unsuited to live with artists. All things considered, we handled the close quarters and tension much better than we had in the early days of the Studio—which surprised me.
But as soon as we could, we all went out for a stroll together. And discovered that we had much more important things to do than compare notes, first.
Distance shrank the mighty Siegfried, but refused to turn it into a Space Commando model; it retained its massive dignity even when viewed from truly Olympian perspective. I felt an uncharacteristic rush of pride at belonging to the species that had built it and hurled it at the sky. It lightened my mood like a shot of oxygen. I tugged at the three kilometers of line that connected me to the great ship, enjoyed the vast snakelike ripples I caused, let their influence put me in a slow roll like an infinite swan dive.
Space turned around me.
Tom and Linda came into view. I didn’t call out to them—their breathing told me that they were in deep meditative trance, and my eyes told me how they had got there. You take that oldest and most enduring of children’s toys, the Slinky. You weld thin flat plates on either end, and bring the accordionlike result out into free space. You place the plates together, so that the Slinky describes a circle. Then you let go. Watch the result for long enough, and you will go into deep trance. The Worm Ourobouros endlessly copulating with himself. They would hear me if I called them by name; they would hear nothing else.
Raoul came into frame next, seen side-on to me. With deadly, matter-of-fact accuracy, he and Harry were hurling that other most durable of toys—a Frisbee (neon-rimmed for visibility)—back and forth across a couple of kilometers of emptiness. This too was more a meditational exercise than anything else; there is next to no skill involved. A flying saucer, it turns out, really is the most dynamically stable shape for a spacecraft. (Take a missile shaped like the old science fiction spaceships, fins and all, and throw it any way you want, with “Kentucky rifle” spin or without: sooner or later it will tumble. A sphere is okay—but unless it was formed in free fall, it’s imperfect: it’ll wobble, worse and worse as it goes.) They were practiced partners; their thruster use was minimal.
Norrey was skipping rope with a bight of her lifeline. Naturally she was rotating in the opposite direction. It was incredibly beautiful to watch, and I canceled my rotation to enjoy it. Perhaps, I thought lazily, we could work that into a dance someday. Dynamic balance, yin and yang, as simple and as complex as a hydrogen atom.
“Don’t atoms dance, Charlie?”
I stiffened, then grinned at myself and relaxed. You can’t haunt me, Shara, I told the hallucinatory voice. You and I are at peace. Without me you could never have done the thing you did; without you I might never have been whole again. Rest in peace.
I watched Norrey some more, in a curiously detached state of mind. Considered objectively, my wife was nowhere near as stunningly beautiful as her dead sister had been. Just strikingly beautiful. And never once in the decades of our bizarre relationship had I ever felt for Norrey the kind of helpless consuming passion I had felt for Shara every minute of the few years I knew her. Thank God. I remembered that passion, that mindless worship that sees a scuff on an apartment floor and says There she placed her foot, that sees a battered camera and says With that I taped her. The sleepless nights and the rivers of scotch and the insulted hookers and the terrible awakenings; through it all the continuous yearning that nothing will abate and only the presence of the loved one will assuage. My passion for Shara had died, vanished forever, almost at the same moment that she did. Norrey had been right, two years ago in Le Maintenant: you only conceive a passion like that for someone you think you can’t have. And the very worst thing that can happen to you is to be wrong.
Shara had been very kind to me.
The love I now shared with Norrey was much quieter, much gentler on the nervous system. Why, I’d managed to overlook it for years. But it was a richer kind of love in the end.
Look, I used this metaphor before I ever dreamed of coming to space, and it’s still good. Picture us all as being in free fall, all of us that are alive. Literally falling freely, at one gee, down a tube so unimaginably long that its ultimate bottom cannot be seen. The vast
tube is studded with occasional obstacles—and the law of averages says that at some finite future time you will smash into one: you will die. There are literally billions of us in this tube, all falling, all sure to hit some day; we carom off each other all the time, whirling more or less at random in and out of lives and groups of lives. Most of us construct belief structures which deny either the falling or the obstacles and place them underneath our feet like skateboards. A good rider can stay on for a lifetime.
Occasionally you reach out and take a stranger’s hand and fall together for a while. It’s not so bad, then. Sometimes if you’re really desperate with fear, you clutch someone like a drowning man clinging to an anchor, or you strive hopelessly to reach someone in a different trajectory, someone you can’t possibly reach, just to be doing something to make you forget that your death is rushing up toward you.
That was the kind of need I had for Shara. I had learned better, from her and from space, and finally from my Last Ride with Norrey a week ago. I had reconciled myself to falling. Norrey and I now fell through life together with great serenity, enjoying the view with a truly binocular vision.
“Has it occurred to any of you,” I asked lazily, “that living in space has just about matured us to the point of early childhood?”
Norrey giggled and stopped skipping. “What do you mean, love?”
Raoul laughed. “It’s obvious. Look at us. A Slinky, a Frisbee, and a jump rope. The thrusting apex of modern culture, kids in the biggest playground God ever made.”
“On tethers,” Norrey said, “like country kids, to keep us out of the garden.”
“Feels good to me,” Harry put in.
Linda was coming out of meditation; her voice was slow, soft. “Charlie is right. We have matured enough to become childlike.”
“That’s closer to what I meant,” I said approvingly. “Play is play, whether it’s a tennis racquet or a rattle. I’m not talking about the kinds of toys we choose, so much. It’s more like…” I paused to think, and they waited. “Listen, it seems to me that I have felt like an old old man since I was about, what, nine years old. This past few years has been the adolescence I never had, and now I’m happy as a child again.”
Linda began to sing:
Can’t remember when I’ve ever been so happy
Happier than I can say
I used to feel older than my own grandpappy
But I’m getting younger every day
“It’s an old Nova Scotia song,” she finished quietly.
“Teach it to me,” Raoul said.
“Later. I want to pursue this thought.”
So did I—but just then my alarm watch went off. I fumbled the stud home through the p-suit, and it subsided. “Sorry, gang. Halfway through our air. Let’s get together for the group exercises. Form up on Linda and we’ll try the Pulsing Snowflake.”
“Shit—work again?” “Phoeey—we’ve got a year to get into shape,” “Wait’ll I catch this sonumbitch, boss,” and “Let’s get it over with,” were the entirely natural-sounding responses to the code phrase. We closed ranks and diddled with our radios.
“There we go,” I said as I closed. “Right, and Harry, you cross over and take Tom’s…that’s right. Wait, look out! Oh Christ!” I screamed.
“No!” Harry shouted.
“Ohmigod,” Raoul bubbled, “Ohmigod his suit’s ripped his suit’s ripped. Somebody do something, ohmigod—”
“May Day,” I roared. “Siegfried from Stardancers, May Day, God damn it. We’ve got a blown suit, I don’t think I can fix it, answer me, will you?”
Silence, except for Harry’s horrible gurgling.
“Siegfried, for the love of God, come in. One of your precious interpreters is dying out here!”
Silence.
Raoul swore and raged, Linda said calming things to him, Norrey prayed softly.
Silence.
“I guess that damper circuit works, Harry,” I said approvingly at last. “We’ve got privacy. By the way, that gurgling was horrible.”
“When did I have a chance to rehearse?”
“You got that heavy-breathing tape going?”
“In circuit,” Harry agreed. “Heavy breathing and cadence counts, no repeats. Hour and a half’s worth.”
“So if anyone’s listening, they’re just, eh, getting into our pants,” Raoul said almost inevitably.
“O-kay,” I said, “let’s talk family talk. We’ve each spent some time with our assigned partners. What’s the consensus?”
Some more silence.
“Well, has anybody got presentiments of doom? Choice gossip? Tom? You follow politics, you knew most of these people by reputation anyway. Tell us all about that first, and then we can compare personal impressions.”
“All right, let’s see—is there anything to be said about DeLaTorre? If he is not a man of honor and compassion, no one is. Even his critics admire him, and a good half of them are willing to admit it. I’ll be honest: I’m not as certain of Wertheimer’s integrity as I am of DeLaTorre’s. Except of course that he picked DeLaTorre to head this posse, which raises him a notch. Anybody feel different? Charlie, he’s your puppetmaster, what do you say?”
“A heartfelt ditto. I’d turn my back on him in the airlock. Go on.”
“Ludmilla Dmirov has a similar reputation for moral toughness, unpusharoundable. She was the first diplomatic official ever to turn down a state-owned dacha in Sovmin. Those of you who don’t know nomenklatura, the patronage system in Moscow, a dacha is sort of a country cabin for high-ranking officials, and turning one down is like a freshman senator refusing to vacation or junket, or a rookie cop turning down the usuals. Unthinkable…and dangerous.” He paused. “But I can’t be as certain that’s it’s integrity with her. It may just be orneriness. And compassionate she is not.”
Norrey was assigned to Dmirov; she spoke up. “I’m not sure I agree, Tom. Oh, she plays chess like a machine, and she sure knows how to be impenetrable—and maybe she doesn’t know enough about when and how to turn it off. But she showed me all her son’s baby pictures, and she told me that the Stardance made her cry. ‘Weep from the chest,’ she said. I think the compassion’s in there.”
“Okay,” Tom said. “I’ll take your word. And she was one of the ones who pushed hard for a UN Space Command. Without her there just might not be a UN anymore, and space might have become the next Alsace-Lorraine. I’m willing to believe her heart’s in the right place.” He paused again. “Uh, with all due respect, I don’t think I’d be prepared to turn my back on her in the airlock yet. But my mind’s open.
“Now, Li,” he went on, “was also a prime mover in the formation of the Space Command—but I’ll lay odds that it was a chess-player’s move for him. I think he took a cold extrapolative look at the future and decided that if the world did blow itself up over the issue of space, it would seriously restrict his political career. He is reputed to be one sharp horse trader and one cold son of a bitch, and they say the road to Hell is paved with the skins of his enemies. He owns a piece of Skyfac Inc. I wouldn’t turn my back on him on live network TV, and Linda, I hope you won’t either.”
“That is certainly the image he has cultivated,” she agreed. “But I must add a few things. He is impeccably polite. He is a philosopher of incredible perception and subtlety. And he is rock steady. Hunger, lack of sleep, danger—none of these will affect his performance or his judgment in any measurable way. Yet I find his mind to be open, to change and to changes. I believe he might well be a real statesman.” She broke off, took a deep breath, and finished, “But I don’t think I trust him either. Yet.”
“Yeah,” Tom said. “Is he a statesman for mankind or for the People’s Republic? Okay, that leaves my own man. Whatever else you can say about the others, they’re probably all statespersons. Sheldon Silverman is a politician. He’s held just about every elective office except President and Vice President. He could have been the latter any time he was silly enough to want to; o
nly some incredibly subtle errors cost him the former. I think he bought or bribed his way onto this trip somehow, as his last chance to earn a whole page in the history books. I think he sees himself as the leader of the team, by virtue of being an American. I despise him. He costs Wertheimer the notch that DeLaTorre earned him, as far as I’m concerned.” He shut up suddenly.
“I think you may be holding his past against him,” Linda said.
“Damn right,” he agreed.
“Well—he’s old. Some old people change, quite radically. Zero gee has been working on him; wait and see. We should bring him out here sometime.”
“My love, your fairness is showing.”
“Damn right,” she said, forcing a grin from him. “It sort of has to.”
“Huh?”
“He gives me the creeps.”
“Oh. I see. I think.”
“Harry, Raoul,” I said, “you’ve been hanging out with the Space Commandos.”
Raoul took it, of course. “Cox we all know or know about. I’d let him hold the last air bottle while I took a leak. His second-in-command is an old-time NASA science officer type.”
“Jock,” Harry put in.
Raoul chuckled. “You know, she is. Susan Pha Song was a Viet Nam War baby, raised in Nam by her aunt after her father split and her mother got napalmed. Hasn’t got much use for America. Physicist. Military through and through; if they told her to she’d nuke Viet Nam and drop rose petals on Washington. She disapproves of music and dance. And me and Harry.”
“She’ll follow orders,” Harry asserted.
“Yeah. For sure. She’s a chicken colonel as of last week, and in the event Commander Cox drops dead, the chain of command goes to her, then Dmirov, presumably. She’s got pilot training, she’s a space freak.”
