by Spider
“They wouldn’t.”
“They might have no choice. Suppose there were a plausible diversion somewhere else. Say, somebody bombed the Shimizu Hotel? At any given time there’s upwards of seven trillion yen on the hoof jaunting around inside that pressure, some of the most influential humans there are. The Space Command hasn’t got a lot of military strength in space to spare: most of their real muscle is the Star Wars net, and that’s aimed one way, straight down. I don’t know how soon the next ship leaves here for Earth, but I do know I’m going to be on it.”
Whether I’m beside you or not.
“You’re just going to run away?”
Think well before saying that to your man, even if it’s true—maybe especially if it’s true; I might just as well have stuck a knife in his belly. Even his unexpressive face showed it. For an instant I remembered his torn foot, injured in trying to shield me, and almost said something to at least try to recall my words. But I was too angry.
He didn’t let the pain reach his voice; it came out flat, firm, controlled. “You bet your life.”
“You mean, just go home and waste all this? All this time, all this work, forget Symbiosis and run away?”
“It will not be wasted. We can always come back, sometime when it is safe again. Even if we never do come back, it hasn’t been a waste: we’ve learned a lot and acquired a lot of very useful skills, and we found each other—” You’re a good three or four minutes late in mentioning that, buster. “—but surely you see that all of that will be wasted if we die?”
“But—but we don’t have to quit. We could…look, we could go to Reb and tell him we want to Graduate early! Right away. We could make him buy it—hell, you’re spaceworthy already, and I know enough to survive long enough to reach the Symbiote mass, I’ve proved that, what more do I really need to know? Whatever it is, I’ll know it as soon as I enter the Starmind! We could pull it off—”
He looked me square in the eye. “Are you ready to take Symbiote? Right now?”
I looked away. “Soon, I mean. A week, say.”
He took my face in his hands and made me look back at him. “Morgan—I am not one hundred percent certain I want to go through with Symbiosis. It scares me silly. But I am one hundred percent sure I do not want to be pressured into it. If it’s a choice between do it within a week and don’t do it, make up your mind, the clock’s ticking…I pass.” He let go of me. “I don’t know about you, but I could use another six months or so to think about it. And besides, I have no way to know we have a week.”
“You think the UN will sell us out that fast?”
“No—but how would you like to go EVA tomorrow and find out you’ve got tanks full of pure nitrogen? The Jihad got to the circulation system: they could get to the tank-charging facilities. Or the Garden. There could be an unfortunate outbreak of botulism, or plague, or rogue replicators from the Safe Lab—all my instincts tell me to get out of here, fast. You mark my words: in twenty-four hours every scheduled seat Earthside will be booked, and they’ll be screaming for special extra flights to handle the overflow. And a lot of people will be suddenly making plans to Graduate ahead of schedule, like you said. But I won’t be one of them. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to risk dying, just at the very verge of life eternal. I’m going home, as fast as I can.”
Damn him for being so intelligent! With anyone else I might have kept that first argument going for hours yet—but he had gone and won the fucking thing. What now? Refuse to concede that, and have us both repeat our lines with minor variations in word choice two or three more times?
No. God damn it. It was time to have the second argument…
“And you don’t care if I come along or not?”
His mouth tightened and his nostrils flared. Again I had stung him. Good.
And again the son of a bitch controlled it and answered reasonably. “Of course I care, Morgan. You must know how much I care. But you’re a free adult: I can’t make your choice for you.”
“The hell you can’t! That’s what you’re trying to do!”
“I am not. I am trying very hard not to. Look, it’s very simple, Morgan. There are two choices: Graduate too early, for the wrong reasons, under the gun, gamble with our lives and our sanity—or fall back and try again later. There’s only one sensible choice. I hope with all my heart that you’ll be sensible. But I can’t make you be.”
“You do, huh? Why do you hope that, Robert?”
He did not answer.
“Why do you hope that, Robert? Say the words. You’ve never said the words.”
“Neither have you.”
“Because I didn’t think we needed to!”
“I didn’t either!” he snapped back, letting anger show in his voice for the first time.
“Well, maybe we were wrong! God damn you, I love you!”
That silly statement hung in the air between us. As if any more irony were needed, the violence of our combined shouting had caused us to start drifting ever so slowly apart. I waved air with my cupped hands to try and cancel it, but he didn’t follow suit, so I stopped.
He seemed to consider several responses. What he finally settled on was, “Do I correctly hear you say that if I loved you, I would be trying to tell you what to do with your life?”
“Of course not!”
“Don’t you see that if you and I hadn’t talked Glenn into staying here, she’d be alive now?”
That hurt. I counterattacked hastily. “And I don’t mean anything more to you than Glenn did?”
“Morgan, for heaven’s sake, be reasonable! I’ve spent thirty years trying to unlearn the idea that women are property, and if you want someone to go twentieth century and start giving you orders like a Muslim or a Fundamentalist…well, I’m afraid you’ll have to get somebody else; it’s just too late for me to start all over again. I don’t want to be any grown-up’s father.”
Is there anything more infuriating than an argument-opponent with impeccable logic? The correct answer was: I don’t want you to give me orders—I want you to be so crazy in love with me that you can’t cut your own marching orders until you know my plans—but I just could not say that out loud…or even to myself.
“Damn you,” I cried, “you leave my father out of this!”
Yes, there is something more infuriating than a logical opponent. A man who is impervious to illogic. He turned and found a handhold, pushed himself over to my terminal. He belted himself in so he could punch keys without ricocheting away, and looked back to me. “May I? I could just go through Teena, but I think you can guess why I’d rather not do that.”
Days ago we had given each other the booting code to our personal terminal…as lovers will, and mere sexers will not. It’s a step more intimate than swapping housekeys, much more intimate than sharing bodily fluids. Someone who can access your personal memory node can drain your financial accounts, read your mail, read your diary if you keep one, send messages in your name. Hands on your keyboard touch you more deeply than hands on your vagina. “Use your own terminal,” I said.
“Certainly,” he said calmly, and unstrapped again. “How many seats shall I reserve?”
“One!” I shouted.
“Morgan—” he began.
“Dammit, you don’t want to be pressured to Graduate, but you’re trying to pressure me into giving it up! Maybe forever—suppose two months from now they blow this place up, and the chance is gone for our lifetime?”
“Then we’ll have a lifetime. That’s the most they promise you when you get born. And we could have it together.”
“But I could never dance again!”
“Then you have to decide whether it’s me you want, or dance. If you stay here, and it happens just as you say…you and I will never see each other again.”
“Not if you don’t run out on me!”
At last I got to him. “I won’t be running out on you if you do the smart thing and leave with me!” he said, raising his voice for the firs
t time.
I had to press the advantage. “Go on, get out of here—you’ve got a plane to catch!”
He drew in breath…and let it out. And took another deep breath, and let that out, a little more slowly. “I’ll reserve two seats. You can always cancel if you choose to.”
I was still in my p-suit; I unsnapped an air bottle and threw it at him. Stupid: he was the only one of our class who had ever beaten Dorothy Gerstenfeld in 3-D handball. He side-stepped like a bullfighter and the tank shattered the monitor screen above my terminal, rebounded with less than half of its original force but spinning crazily. I was spinning myself from having thrown it, and whacked my head on something. The tank swacked into Kirra’s sleepsack and was stopped by it. When I looked around, Robert was gone.
Good riddance, I thought, and doubled over and wept in great racking sobs. My eyes grew tendrils of silvery tears; I smashed them into globular fragments that danced and eddied in the air like little transparent Fireflies before breaking apart and whirling away.
God damn him to hell, turning it around like that and dumping it back on me! Now if we break up it’ll be my choice, because I choose to cancel my seat home—and it’s his fierce respect for my free womanhood that keeps him from saying anything more than ‘he hopes I’ll be sensible.’ He wouldn’t say the fucking words, even after I did!
So close to having it all! Another lousy two or three weeks and I would have had dance and Symbiosis and Robert. How could I have been so stupid, thinking they’d let me have it all?
A part of my mind tried to argue. You can still have Symbiosis. The whole Starmind, all these people, will enfold you and—
—and love me, right? When nobody else ever has.
A thought forced its way into my head. Robert had gone down the hall to use his own terminal. Kirra and Ben were presumably there. They would see what he was typing. Or he’d shield the monitor, which would make them curious. At any moment Kirra might come jaunting in here, grimly determined to have me cry on her shoulder. I don’t cry on anybody’s shoulder. When I cry, I cry alone. I forced my sobs to subside. I could not achieve control of my breath, but I made the tears dry up. I jaunted to the vanity, got tissues, and honked and wiped and snuffled and wiped. I checked my face in the mirror, made myself wash it. “Teena, is my studio free?”
“Repeat, please, Morgan,” Teena said in her mechanical voice.
I took a shuddering deep breath, got my voice under control, and repeated the question. Yes, she said, it was available. I told her I wanted it for the rest of the day, and she said that was acceptable. I told her I wanted it for the rest of month, and she said I would have to clear that with Dorothy Gerstenfeld or Phillipe Mgabi. I started to tell her I wanted it for the rest of my life…and thanked her and left for the studio. I actually got within fifty meters of it before collapsing into tears again. What triggered it was the sudden realization that I had not given a single thought to Glenn since I’d gotten back to my room. And now I was going to miss her funeral. The tears flew from my eyes like bullets. No one was around to see, and I sealed the hatch behind me before anyone came along.
If you’re ever going to have a day like that, try to have it later in the day. It took me hours to cry myself to sleep.
In similar situations back on Earth I used to lie on the studio floor and cry, let the floor drink my tears as it so often drank my blood. Here there was no floor. I missed it bitterly.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A fallen blossom
Come back to its branch?
No, a butterfly!
—Moritake (1452-1549)
I GOT HOME a few hours before breakfast. Kirra was alone in the room, and woke as I came in. “Are you right, love?”
I knew that was Aussie for, are you all right?, but I couldn’t help hearing the words as they sounded too. “Ask me again next year,” I said to both questions. “You heard, huh?”
“We heard.” She slipped out of her sleepsack. “Robert’s found himself another room until the ship leaves.”
“Where’s Ben?”
“I told him I’d wait here for you alone ’til brekkie, then we were gonna hunt you down together.”
By then she had reached me, and was hugging me. It helped a little, as much as anything could help. She did not say a single one of the clichés I’d been dreading, only held me. After a time she began singing softly, in Yirlandji, and that helped me a little too.
Awhile later she said, “Tucker?” and I said, “No. You go,” and she nodded. “Bring you back somethin’?” she asked, and I said, “No.” She left, and I slid into my sleepsack and went fetal.
She let me have the rest of the day, and then at around suppertime she showed up with what might just have been the only thing in human space that could have made me feel like eating. “You’re not serious,” I said when she took it out of its thermos bag and tossed it to me. “How could you possibly—”
“Sulke knows a bloke at the Shimizu.”
“But it must have cost—”
“The bloke liked me Song o’ Polar Orbit a lot; it’s his shout.”
Even in my misery it reached me. A full litre of fine Chilean chocolate chip ice cream. Back in Vancouver it would have been an expensive luxury; here it was a pearl without price. She had heard me speak longingly of it several times; she’d even remembered my favorite flavour. I had no idea what her favorite flavour was. “Pull up a spoon,” I said, and we dug in together.
As we ate she filled me in on the news.
It was going just as Robert had predicted. Third-Monthers were Graduating en masse. Some of the rest of us, mostly Novices, had decided they were ready for early Graduation—from one to five weeks early!—and some, mostly Postulants, had suddenly remembered pressing business dirtside. Already there were no more seats available on the next regularly scheduled transport (two days hence), and the special charter that had been announced was filling up fast. Robert and I were not the only couple who had split up.
There were some students who took neither course. Some lacked the imagination to realize how comprehensive a disaster it would have been if that missile had destroyed the docks—and some were just the kind of people who insist on building their home on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius or in San Francisco. (Come to think of it, Robert was going home to San Francisco. What kind of logic was that?)
And of course there were the spacers on staff. Going dirtside was not an option for them. Those who could were trying to change jobs, or rather, eliminate Top Step from their job rotations. Those who could not were trying to get work deep inboard, on the theory that they’d be safer from attack. It was a shaky theory.
I was unsurprised to learn Kirra and Ben’s choice.
“We’re doin’ it, love. Ben and me, this Sunday. I reckon you guessed we would.”
“Good for you,” I said. My eyes were stinging. “Pushing ahead the wedding. That makes me really happy.”
“You want to join us?”
“Thanks for asking. But no. I’m not ready. Reb would never let me do it in this state. You two go on—I’ll catch you up as soon as I can.”
Privately I wondered if I meant that. I still was not utterly certain that I wanted to go through with Symbiosis. The idea of lowering all my defenses, forever, was seeming less and less attractive. Wouldn’t it be just perfect if I finally decided to chicken out…after cutting my ties with Robert? If I played my cards right, I could come out of this with nothing at all.
The next couple of days were sheerest hell. I kept going over and over it in my mind. A thousand times I asked myself, why not just go back to Earth and Robert? So he didn’t love me the way I loved him; he cared, and that could well become love in time. A thousand times I answered, because he had made it an ultimatum, and because he would not admit he had done so, and because I just couldn’t risk losing dance forever, even for him.
And because he hadn’t asked me to—just assumed I’d “be sensible.”
A thousand times I co
ncluded I had made the right decision. But I didn’t call Teena and tell her to cancel the reservation Robert had made in my name.
He called me once, about twenty-four hours after the quarrel. I had instructed Teena not to put through any calls from him, so he recorded a long message. When she told me, I had her wipe it, unplayed. A mistake: I spent hours wondering what he had said.
Twice I forced myself to go to the cafeteria, using Teena to make sure he was not there at the time. The food tasted like hell. Once I let Ben and Kirra (almost literally) drag me to Le Puis. Even Fat Humphrey didn’t cheer me up, nor the Hurricanes he prescribed for me. With Kirra right there listening, Ben made the politest pass I’d ever received; I almost smiled as I thanked him and turned him down.
That night Reb came to visit me in my room. He expressed sympathy, and offered to help in any way he could. He did not, as I’d half expected, try to persuade me to stop grieving. Instead he encouraged me to grieve, the faster to use it up. But I noticed something subtle about his word choice. He never said he was sorry Robert and I were breaking up. He only said he was sorry I was suffering over it.
A friend of my parents, back on Gambier Island, once responded to his wife’s leaving him by taking their beloved dog back up into the woods and shooting him. I’d never understood how anyone could do something so simultaneously selfish and self-destructive until I found myself on the verge of making a pass at Reb. Hurt people do crazy things, that’s all. I was luckier than my parents’ friend had been: I caught myself in time, and Reb failed to notice, the nicest thing he could have done.
