by Spider
I will say one thing about that year. The man I had been when I first came to space could not have survived it. He would have blown out his brains, or drunk himself to death.
Instead I went out for lots of walks. And made lots of love with Norrey. With music on, for privacy.
Other than that the only event of note was when Linda announced that she was pregnant, about two months out of Saturn. We were committed to solving zero-gee childbirth without an obstetrician. Or, for that matter, a GP.
Things got livelier as we neared Saturn.
Chapter 2
We had not succeeded in persuading any of the diplomats to join us in EVA of any kind. Three refused for the predictable reason. EVA is measurably more dangerous than staying safely indoors (as I had been forcibly reminded on the day I had gotten into this), and duty forbade them from taking any avoidable risk on their way to what was literally the biggest and most important conference in history. We dancers were considered more expendable, but pressure was put on us to avoid having all four dancers outboard at the same time. I stuck to my guns, maintaining that a group dance must be planned, choreographed, and rehearsed ensemble—that what Stardancers, Inc. was, was a creative collective. Besides, the more buddies you have, the safer you are.
The fourth diplomat, Silverman, had been specifically ordered not to expose himself to space. So early on he asked us to take him out for a walk. Sort of a “they can’t tell a fearless SOB like me not to take risks” thing: the order impugned his masculinity. He changed his mind when p-suit plumbing was explained to him, and never brought the subject up again.
But a few weeks before we were to begin deceleration, Linda came to my room and said, “Chen Ten Li wants to come out for a walk with us.”
I winced, and did my Silverman imitation. “It would kill you, first to sit me down and say, ‘I have bad news for you’? Like that you tell me?”
“Like that he told me.”
What would DeLaTorre think? Or Bill? Or the others? Or old Wertheimer, who had told me with his eyes that he believed I could be trusted not to fuck up? And as important, why did Chen now want to earn his wings? Not for scenery—he had first-class video, the best Terra could provide, which is good. Not for jackass reasons like Silverman.
“What does he want, Linda? To see a rehearsal live? To drift and meditate? What?”
“Ask him.”
I had never seen the inside of Chen’s room before. He was playing 3-D chess with the computer. I can barely follow the game, but it was clear that he was losing badly—which surprised me.
“Dr. Chen, I understand you want to come outside with us.”
He was dressed in tastefully lavish pajamas, which he had expertly taken in for free fall and velcro’d (Dmirov and DeLaTorre had been forced to ask Raoul for help, and Silverman’s clothes looked as though he had backed into a sewing machine). He inclined his shaven head, and replied gravely, “As soon as possible.” His voice was like an old cornet, a little feathery.
“That puts me in a difficult position, sir,” I said as gravely. “You are under orders not to endanger yourself. DeLaTorre and all the others know it. And if I did bring you outside, and you had a suit malf, or even a nausea attack, the people’s Republic of China would ask me some pointed questions. Followed by the Dominion of Canada and the United Nations, not to mention your aged mother.”
He smiled politely, with lots of wrinkles. “Is that outcome probable?”
“Do you know Murphy’s Law, Dr. Chen? And its corollary?”
His smile widened. “I wish to risk it. You are experienced at introducing neophytes to space.”
“I lost two out of seventeen students!”
“How many did you lose in their first three hours, Mr. Armstead? Could I not remain in the Die, wearing a pressure suit for redundancy?”
The Die wasn’t cast; it was spot-welded. It was essentially an alloy-framed cube of transparent plastic, outfitted for minimal life support, first aid, and self-locomotion through free space. The crew and all the diplomats except Chen called it the Field Support Module. This disgusted Harry, who had designed and built it. The idea was that one of us Stardancers might blow a gasket in midconference, or want to sit out a piece, or conserve air, or for some other reason need a pressurized cubic with a 360° view. It was currently braced tight against the hull of the big shuttlecraft we called the Limousine, mounted for use, but it could easily be unshipped. And Chen’s pressure suit was regulation Space Command armor, as good as or better than even our customized Japanese-made suits. Certainly stronger; better air supply…
“Doctor, I have to know why.”
His smile began to slo-o-owly fade, and when I hadn’t blanched or retracted by half past, he let it remain there. About a quarter to frowning. “I concede your right to ask the question. I am not certain I can satisfy you at this time.” He reflected, and I waited. “I am not accustomed to using an interpreter. I have facility with languages. But there is at least one language I will never acquire. I was once informed that no one could learn to think in Navajo who was not raised a Navajo. Consequently I went to great lengths to accomplish this, and I failed. I can make myself understood to a Navajo, haltingly. I cannot ever learn to think in that language—it is founded on basically different assumptions about reality that my mind cannot enfold.
“I have studied your dance, the ‘language’ you will speak for us shortly. I have discussed it with Ms. Parsons at great length, exhausted the ship’s computer on the subject. I cannot learn to think in that language.
“I wish to try one more time. I theorize that confrontation with naked space, in person, may assist me.” He paused, and grinned again. “Ingesting buds of peyote assisted me somewhat in my efforts with Navajo—as my tutor had promised me. I must expose myself to your assumptions about reality. I hope they taste better.”
It was by far the longest speech I had gotten out of the epigrammatic Chen since the day we met. I looked at him with new respect, and some astonishment. And a growing pleasure: here was a friend I had almost missed making. My God, suppose old Chen is Homo novis?
“Dr. Chen,” I said, when I could get my breath, “let’s go see Commander Cox.”
Chen listened with total absorption to eighteen hours’ worth of instruction, most of which he already knew, and asked infrequent but highly insightful questions. I’m willing to bet that before the instruction he could have disassembled any subsystem in his suit in the dark. By the end I’d have bet he could build ’em in the dark, starting with free-floating components. I have been exposed to a rather high number of extraordinary minds, and he impressed me.
But I still wasn’t sure I trusted him.
We held the party to three, on the less-to-go-wrong theory—in space, trouble seldom comes in ones. I was the obvious Scoutmaster; I had logged more EVA hours than anyone aboard except Harry. And Linda had been Chen’s Alien 101 instructress for the past year; she came along to maintain classroom continuity. And to dance for him, while I played Mother Hen. And, I think, because she was his friend.
The first hour passed without incident, all three of us in the Die, me at the con. We put a few klicks between us and Siegfried, trailing a suspenders-and-belt safety line, and came to rest, as always, in the exact center of infinity. Chen was reverentially silent rather than isolated. He was, I believed, capable of encompassing that much wonder—it was almost as though he had always known the universe was that big. Still he was speechless for a long time.
So were Linda and I, for that matter. Even at this distance Saturn looked unbelievably beautiful, beyond the power of words to contain. That planet must unquestionably be the damndest tourist attraction in the Solar System, and I had never seen anything so immensely moving in my life.
But we had seen it before in recent days—the whole ship’s complement had been glued to the video tanks. We recovered, and Linda told Chen some last thoughts about the way we danced, and then she sealed her hood and went out the airlock to show
him some solo work. By prearrangement we were all to remain silent for this period, and Bill too maintained radio silence on our channel. Chen watched with great fascination for three quarters of Linda’s first hour. Then he sighed, glanced at me oddly, and kicked himself across the Die to the control panel.
I started to cry out—but what he reached for was only the Die’s radio. He switched it off. Then he removed his helmet in one practiced-seeming move, disconnecting his suit’s radio. I had my own hood off to save air, and grabbed for it when I saw him kill the radio, but he held a finger to his lips and said, “I would speak with you under the rose.” His voice was high and faint in the low pressure.
I considered the matter. Assuming the wildest paranoid fantasy, Linda was mobile and could see anything that happened in the transparent cube. “Sure,” I called.
“I sense your unease, and understand and respect it. I am going to put my hand in my right pouch and remove an object. It is harmless.” He did so, producing one of those microcorders that looks like a fancy button. “I wish there to be truth between us,” he added. Was it low pressure stridency alone that gave his voice that edge?
I groped for an appropriate response. Beyond him, Linda was whirling gracefully through space, sublimely pregnant, oblivious. “Sure,” I said again.
He thumbnailed the playback niche. Linda’s recorded voice said something that I couldn’t hear, and I shook my head. He rewound to the same cue and underhanded it gently toward me.
“That’s what I mean,” Linda’s voice repeated. “Their interests and ours may not coincide.”
The tape record I spoke of a while ago.
My brain instantly went on computer time, became a hyperefficient thinking machine, ran a thousand consecutive analysis programs in a matter of microseconds, and self-destructed. Hand in the cookie jar. Halfway down the Mountain and the brakes are gone. I’d have sworn I closed that airlock. The microcorder hit me in the cheek; instinctively I caught it on the rebound and shut it off as Tom was asking Linda, “Aren’t we human?”
And that echoed in the Die for a while.
“Only an imbecile would find it difficult to bug an unguarded pressure suit,” Chen said tonelessly.
“Yeah,” I croaked, and cleared my throat. “Yeah, that was stupid. Who else—?” I broke off and slapped my forehead. “No. I don’t want to ask any stupid questions. Well, what do you think, Chen Ten Li? Are we Homo novis? Or just gifted acrobats? I’m God damned if I know.”
He jaunted cleanly back to me, like an arrow in slow-motion flight. Cats jaunt like that. “Homo caelestis, perhaps,” he said calmly, and his landing was clean. “Or possibly Homo ala anima.”
“Allah who? Oh—‘winged soul.’ Huh. Okay. I’ll buy that. Let me try a whammy on you, Doc. I’ll bet a cookie that you’re a ‘winged soul’ yourself. Potentially, at least.”
His reaction astonished me. I had expected a sudden poker face. Instead naked grief splashed his face, stark loss and hopeless yearning, etched by Saturnlight. I never saw such wide-open emotion on his face before or since; it may be that no one but his aged mother and his dead wife ever had. It shocked me to my socks, and it would have shocked him too if he had been remotely aware of it.
“No, Mist’ Armstead,” he said bleakly, staring at Saturn over my shoulder. His accent slipped for the first and last time, and absurdly reminded me of Fat Humphrey. “No, I am not one of you. Nor can time or my will make it so. I know this. I am reconciled to this.” As he got this far, his face began relaxing into its customary impassivity, all unconsciously. I marveled at the discipline of his subconscious mind, and interrupted him.
“I don’t know that you’re right. It seems to me that any man who can play three-D chess is a prime candidate for Homo whateverthehell.”
“Because you are ignorant of three-D chess,” he said, “and of your own nature. Men play three-D chess on Earth. It was designed under one gravity, for a vertical player, and its classic patterns are linear. I have tried to play in free fall, with a set that is not fixed in that relationship to me, and I cannot. I can consistently beat the Martin-Daniels Program at flat chess” (world class) “but in free-fall three-D Mr. Brindle could easily defeat me, if I were unvain enough to play him. I can coordinate myself well enough aboard the Siegfried or in this most linear of vehicles. But I can never learn to live for any length of time without what you call a ‘local vertical.’”
“It comes on slow,” I began.
“Five months ago,” Li interrupted, “the night light failed in my room. I woke instantly. It took me twenty minutes to locate the light switches. During that entire time I wept with fear and misery, and lost control of my sphincters. The memory offended me, so I spent several weeks devising tests and exercises. I must have a local vertical to live. I am a normal human.”
I was silent a long time. Linda had noticed our conversation; I signaled her to keep on dancing and she nodded. After I had thought things through I said, “Do you believe that our interests will fail to coincide with yours?”
He smiled, all diplomat again, and chuckled. “Are you familiar with Murphy’s Law, Mr. Armstead?”
I grinned back. “Yeah, but is it probable?”
“I don’t believe so,” he answered seriously. “But I believe that Dmirov would believe so. Possibly Ezequiel. Possibly Commander Cox. Certainly Silverman.”
“And we must assume that any of them might also have bugged a suit.”
“Tell me: Do you agree that if this conference generates any information of great strategic value, Silverman will attempt to establish sole possession of it?”
Chatting with Chen was like juggling chainsaws. I sighed. We were being honest. “Yeah—if he got a chance to pull it off, sure. But that’d take some doing.”
“One person with the right program tapes could bring Siegfried close enough to Terra for retrieval,” he said, and I noticed that he didn’t say “one man.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I am presently jamming any possible bugs in this vehicle. I believe Silverman will attempt this thing. I smell it. If he does, I will kill him at once. You and your people react quickly in free fall; I want you to understand my motives.”
“And they are?”
“Preservation of civilization on Terra. The continued existence of the human race.”
I decided to try throwing him a hot one. “Will you shoot him with that automatic?”
He registered faint distaste. “I cycled that out the airlock two weeks after departure,” he said. “An absurd weapon in free fall, as I should have realized. No, I shall probably break his back.”
Don’t give this guy strong serves: his return is murder.
“Where will you stand in that event, Mr. Armstead?”
“Eh?”
“Silverman is a fellow Caucasian, a fellow North American. You share a cultural matrix. Is that a stronger bond than your bond with Homo caelestis?”
“Eh?” I said again.
“Your new species will not survive long if the blue Earth is blown apart,” Chen said harshly, “which is what that madman Silverman would have. I don’t know how your mind works, Mr. Armstead: what will you do?”
“I respect your right to ask the question,” I said slowly. “I will do what seems right to me at the time. I have no other answer.”
He searched my face and nodded. “I would like to go outside now.”
“Jesus Christ,” I exploded, and he cut me off.
“Yes, I know—I just said I couldn’t function in free space, and now I want to try.” He gestured with his helmet. “Mr. Armstead, I anticipate that I may die soon. Once before that time I must hang alone in eternity, subject to no acceleration, without right angles for frames, in free space. I have dreamed of space for most of my life, and feared to enter it. Now I must. As nearly as I can say it in your language, I must confront my God.”
I wanted to say yes. “Do you know how much that can resemble sensory deprivation?” I
argued. “How’d you like to lose your ego in a space suit? Or even just your lunch?”
“I have lost my ego before. Someday I will forever. I do not get nauseous.” He began putting his helmet on.
“No, dammit, watch out for the nipple. Here, let me do it.”
After five minutes he switched his radio back on and said, shakily. “I’m coming in now.” After that he didn’t say anything until we were unbuttoning in Siegfried’s shuttlecraft bay. Then he said, very softly, “It is I who am Homo excastra. And the others,” and those were the last words he said to me until the first day of Second Contact.
What I replied was, “You are always welcome in my home, Doctor,” but he made no reply.
Deceleration brought a horde of minor disasters. If you move into a small apartment (and never leave it) by the end of a year your belongings will have tended to spread out considerably. Zero gee amplifies the tendency. Storing everything for acceleration would have been impossible even if all we’d had to contend with was the twenty-five hours of a hundredth gee. But even the straightest, laser-sighted pipeline has some kinks in it, and our course was one of the longest pipelines ever laid by Man (over a billion klicks). Titan’s gravity well was a mighty small target at the end of it, that we had to hit just precisely right. Before Skyfac provided minimicrochip computer crystals the trick would not have been possible, and we had had small corrections en route. But the moon swam up fast, and we took a couple of one-gee burns that, though mercifully short, made me strongly doubt that we could survive even a two-year return trip. They also scattered wreckage, mostly trivial, all over the ship: Fibber McGee’s closet, indoors. The worst of it, though, appeared to be a ruptured water line to the midships shower bags, and the air conditioning handled it.
Even being forewarned of an earthquake doesn’t help much.
On the other hand, cleanup was next to no problem at all—again, thanks to zero gee. All we had to do was wait, and sooner or later virtually all of the debris collected on the air conditioning grilles of its own accord, just like always. Free-fall housekeeping mostly involves replacing worn-out velcro and grille screens.
