“That’s good enough,” John said suddenly, almost roughly. He stood, gripping Raef’s body under the shoulders, and dragged him closer to the womb mouth.
“John. Connie.” Tug’s voice was ragged with effort. “Stop this now. Our survival depends on it.”
Startled, Connie dropped the small knife she’d been in the process of sheathing. It made no sound as it landed on the floor of the womb chamber. John froze, incredulous of the weakness he heard.
“What’s going on?” John demanded angrily. “What are you talking about?”
“Raef is dangerous to us all. Not just his disease. He’s corrupted Evangeline, driven her to mutiny against me. Why do you think it took me so long to force her to come back for you. I’m fighting for control even now. If you give Raef back to her, I’ll be powerless to control her. She’ll kill us all.” His voice had gone very strained, somewhere between fearful and weak. It was enough to make John pause. He looked at Connie, uncertainty in his eyes.
A driving urgency suddenly assailed Connie. “Let’s get Raef into the womb, and then talk,” she suggested suddenly. She moved to help John drag him over to the womb mouth.
“It’s the worst mistake you can make,” Tug declared. “It’s the only thing we have that she wants. He’s our only bargaining chip. Give him to her, and she’s totally beyond our control.”
Connie saw John’s hesitation. “Maybe we should go to the medic chamber. Stabilize him, talk to him first.”
“No,” she said decisively. “Raef wanted to be put back in a womb chamber. He wants to be with Evangeline. He says she’ll take care of him.”
“At least … hear me out.” Tug’s voice faded suddenly in an odd way, came back pitched slightly lower. “Let me explain the situation. Let me tell you what you’re throwing away.”
“While Raef dies?” Connie challenged him.
John set a calming hand on her shoulder. “Talk fast, Tug,” he warned him.
“I’ll try. It’s harder for me than you think. I’m … she’s already killed me, essentially. I won’t live much longer. I know I won’t survive another lift-off. This gravity, and the additional G’s of leaving it … my body is crushed, John. I’m dying right now. All I’m asking is that you get my segments back to Home, so they can be fertilized and my memories saved. That’s all I’m asking of you.” Tug’s pause grew long. “You owe me that much, both of you,” he added suddenly.
John’s face, grown white and strained at first, suddenly hardened. “I owe you nothing.”
Connie crouched by Raef, took both his hands in hers. Were they cold, or were her own hands sweaty? She held them firmly, tried to pour her own strength into him.
“The nature of a Beast,” Tug said ponderously. “Is that they require a companion. By some freakish accident, she became … aware of Raef. He usurped my place with Evangeline. His unbalanced ideas.” Tug paused, collected himself. “Have unbalanced her simple nature. If you give him back to her, she has no need for me. Or for other companionship…. Leave her lonely. She’ll be forced, eventually, to seek out other Beasts. She’ll be recaptured, retrained…. My segments will be rescued and fertilized. My ideas will live on.”
“Will Evangeline?” Connie asked softly. John seemed transfixed by Tug’s dragging words. Tug ignored her question.
“You’ll be rescued. Taken care of. Forgiven. But if you give her Raef, you will never see home again. Never see other Humans. You’ll die on this ship. Alone.”
“Castor and Pollux aren’t home,” Connie pointed out softly. She looked up at John as she added, “I won’t miss the company of other Humans.” She touched Raef’s face, felt the pulse that jumped at the corner of his jaw. “Raef is our friend. And I believe what he said about Evangeline. She’s no more a beast than I am.”
“So you’ll murder me for Raef’s sake,” Tug accused her bluntly.
“From what you say, you’re already dead,” Connie declared. “Letting Raef die won’t keep you alive. And keeping him alive might let Evangeline be free.”
Tug’s voice changed suddenly. The effort was still there, but there was a hard, cold edge as he suddenly offered, “I’ll make you a trade, John. Give up Raef’s life for me. There isn’t much left of it anyway. And I’ll give you all the life there used to be on Terra. Everything you need to start it over again.”
“What kind of fool do you take me for?” John asked slowly. “You can’t offer what you don’t have.”
“I know where it is, John…. Earth Affirmed’s precious time capsule. All the biological data, all the samples. Get my segments safely Home and fertilized. They’ll have the location in their memories. They’ll tell you.”
A terrible wave of agitation swelled through Connie. “No!” she declared suddenly. “He has to be put back in a womb.” John seemed transfixed by indecision. She set her own weight, dragged determinedly at Raef’s bulk. A little spittle bubbled at the corner of Raef’s mouth with each delayed breath he managed. “John, help me,” she demanded, and saw him startle as if from sleep.
“We’re going to womb him, Tug,” John said abruptly, quietly. “Earth isn’t dead. It doesn’t need a time capsule. Everything that could live there, is. You aren’t offering me anything. And Raef’s life isn’t mine to trade.”
“You’re betraying your whole race,” Tug accused him. “And me. For a Beast. A creature capable of only the most fuzzy thinking, the most selfish living. She’s not what you think. And Raef.” Tug’s words came in broken snatches. “He’s not just diseased, he’s damaged. You’ve heard him talk. He’s all memories, with scarcely a thought of his own. For those two, you’d let me die. Me, who sheltered you from the Conservancy, even when I knew you weren’t fit to captain this ship. Me, who gave you the chance to become what you are, who …”
“Get him into a womb!” Connie cried out frantically. The lights in the chamber winked out suddenly, then restored themselves. Flashed again.
“Tug, stop it!” John growled. “Stupid stalling games won’t work now.”
“You owe me,” Tug began desperately, angrily.
“It’s not Tug.” Connie made the intuitive leap. “It’s Evangeline,” she declared wildly. “John, she wants Raef in a womb. Now.”
As if in response, the chamber lights strobed.
“Don’t do it,” Tug warned them. “You’ll regret it. You’re killing me, for the sake of a … madman and a beast. Ones who’ll never be able to repay you with anything! What do you gain from this? Nothing. And you lose all … everything!”
“Womb,” Connie said to John. He nodded mutely. It was odd to work against gravity, odder still to be entering someone else into a womb chamber instead of herself. Connie had never before realized how much weightlessness aided one in entering and exiting the clinging confines of a womb. John opened the womb mouth, inserted his own head and shoulders, and then reached for Raef. Connie pushed as John hooked his hands under Raef’s arms and heaved. The big man’s body began to inch into the womb. John had to crawl inside with Raef, dragging him along. Connie watched helplessly as the walls of the womb flexed as John struggled to make the umbilical connections. Now he was sticking the monitoring nodes to his skull. That Raef’s hair had grown so rapidly could only complicate things. She heard John cursing as he struggled.
Tug’s voice was an odd counterpoint. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he told them. “It’s not just the time capsule. You’re exiling yourself from the Human race.”
The lights in the chamber flashed wildly, and Connie felt only a surge of encouragement. Gratitude, she might almost have called it.
“Everything you ever dreamed of is in that time capsule, John. All the poems you ever read or wrote. Mighty oaks and nodding poppies. Dappled horses and panting dogs. You could start it all again, your whole world. It’s not impossible.”
John’s feet and legs, still projecting from the womb’s neck, suddenly grew still.
“John?” Connie asked questioningly after a moment.
“John, are you all right?” There was no response.
“John, Connie!” The desperation in Tug’s voice was bared now. “Remove Raef. It’s not too late. Please. Remove Raef. Without Raef distracting her, Evangeline can be made to see reason….”
Strange, how quickly it became easy to ignore his voice. From the flexings of the womb wall, Connie judged that John was managing the skull monitors. Already the fat grey tubes that fed the womb and removed wastes were swelling and pulsing reassuringly.
“And I promise you, all will go well …” Tug’s voice was more desperate. Connie heard him, but felt only satisfaction. Her own or Evangeline’s? She was not sure.
“The Conservancy will be made to understand, no one will be punished. Earth will be restored. Listen to reason.” Tug was babbling now.
“John?” Connie queried again as the swollen womb grew still. His feet stirred suddenly and began to scrabble against the floor. Connie helped him struggle out as soon as she realized that was what he was trying to do. The womb reflexively sealed up around Raef. John dropped to the floor, and leaned back against the walls of the womb chamber as if exhausted. He sat silently for a moment. Then he smiled wearily at Connie. “We were in time. She’s got him now and he’s stabilizing.”
“You’ve condemned us all!” Tug’s voice seemed a distant thing, unable to penetrate the sudden welling of joy Connie felt.
“So I see,” she told John, and took his hand to help him up, heedless of the red stickiness on his fingers.
John laughed oddly. “I didn’t need to see. I know.” He grinned up at her. “She told me. Inside there, you can hear her. No. Not hear. But it’s like someone whispering right behind your ear. She called me by name. Knew it was me. Raef was right, and I thought he was crazy.”
“Take me Home. Have my segments preserved. Do this, and I promise you’ll get the time capsule, and the help of the Arthroplana in recovering it. You’ll be shielded from the Conservancy’s anger. But refuse, and the Conservancy will know all. And you’ll return only to face Readjustment or termination. Without me, you cannot go back. Don’t you see that? Even if Raef could manage Evangeline …”
“She said we have to get into the gondola, into loungers and strapped in. She wants to get up, get Raef into weightlessness as soon as possible.”
“Won’t the increased G’s of takeoff kill him?” Connie asked, but she was already following John out of the chamber.
“I won’t survive takeoff. That’s what you should be worrying about. I’m your only hope. Without me, you have no hope of ever returning to Delta, or the planets. You’ll never see your friends, your home again.”
“She’s going to try to be careful, to keep the stresses as low as she can. But she thinks she’ll be able to sustain Raef through it now, and that in weightlessness his body will make better progress at repairing itself.”
“You’ll never go home again!” Tug threatened wildly. “Not if you let me die.”
“Tug.” Connie’s voice was almost gentle. “Tug, we’ve been home.” She paused, then spoke with painful honesty. “And I don’t think there’s any way we can prevent your death.”
They both received the sensation at the same moment. “Hurry,” John said, even as Connie turned to him and said, “Hurry.”
He followed her from the womb chamber and into the lift. Tug’s voice accompanied them, a ghastly cacophony of threats and pleas, demands and whimpers. On the womb levels they were oddly easy to ignore, but as they disembarked from the lift into the gondola, the horror of what they were hearing seized them both.
“Owe me … will always owe me … terrible mistake. One you’ll always regret … betraying your race, your values, your planet … Murderers and fools …” His voice was distorting so badly, whether from pain or fury, that Connie could scarcely follow his words. Bereft of Evangeline’s cushioning wall of emotion, the overwhelming sense of righteousness and confidence that Connie had been feeling receded. The corridors seemed cold and dimmer as they followed the lights to the command chamber. Connie felt ill. Tug was ranting like a madman now. “John?” she asked questioningly.
“There’s nothing we can do,” he said, and for the first time she noticed the whiteness around his mouth and the set of his jaws. Reflexively he was turning on monitors and activating data reports on the ship. “There was never anything we could do. Tug was desperate, deceiving himself.” He used the past tense, regardless of the low voice that now cursed, now pleaded with them. John paused, faced her squarely. “Get strapped in. This isn’t going to be a pleasant experience.” Almost without pause, he added softly, “After everything Raef told us about Evangeline, I doubt that she’d ever allow herself to be recaptured. She’d fly into a star first.” His eyes lost their focus. “Inside the womb, there. I could really feel what she felt toward Tug. All of it. And what Raef was to her. It’s like …” He looked directly at her, and his words trickled away. He tried again. “Once you’ve had a real friend, a companion who genuinely cares …”
He shook his head abruptly, disgusted with the poorness of words. Instead, as if it were routine, he checked Connie’s harness, found it secure. He leaned down to her, kissed her suddenly in a way he never had before, as if sealing something between them. Transfixed, Connie could only watch as he moved to his own lounger, buckled in, and leaned back. Their eyes met once more. Then he gripped the armrests and closed his eyes.
It took Evangeline seventeen minutes and thirty-seven seconds to achieve orbit. Tug stopped screaming long before that, but Connie heard the silence that followed forever.
20
SHE HAD LEFT RAEF ALONE, with his own thoughts. It was still a difficult thing for her to do, but she had recognized two things: one, that even her gentle presence was tiring to him right now, and secondly that Raef would always need, from time to time, privacy within his own mind. “If I’m never going to be awake again,” he had told her bluntly, “my private time is going to get really important to me.”
[Your body will heal,] she had tried to comfort him. [It is only for now that I am necessary to sustain it.]
“Evangeline,” he’d told her gently. “I felt it happen to me; parts of me just shut down. That damn Tug. He knew exactly what he was doing. If he had managed to stall them just a few minutes more, I’d have been a dead man.”
[He’s dead.]
“I know. Evangeline. You didn’t do it on purpose. Maybe if he’d been a little more open, told us right out that he couldn’t hack any gravity without months of preparation, without growing a shell, we’d have found a way. Hell, he could have stopped us at any time, just by letting us talk to John and Connie. It was his own fault, he brought it on himself.”
[You mistake me. He is dead, and I do not care. I feel nothing.]
“Evangeline. Your nose will grow if you tell lies.”
[That is from the pretense Pinnochio. It does not apply to me.]
“It applies to when people say one thing, but feel something else.”
[I am not a “people.”]
“Couldn’t prove it by me. Look. We won’t talk about it just now. Maybe it is something you need privacy about in your own mind.”
That had been a new idea, and it had taken some moments for her to absorb it. [It is strange that you know things about me that I do not know myself.]
“It’s called being friends. But even friends need private times from each other.”
[I understand this now. But you will have time away from me, when you wake up. Your body will not be as it was, but …]
“Maybe I’d be able to wake up. Maybe eventually I’ll want to, just to talk face-to-face with John and Connie. But I know how much I aged back there on Earth, and I can guess at how much motor control I lost when my heart acted up. Call me a coward, but I’d rather run in my dreams than crawl when I’m awake.”
“Give it time,” she’d suggested.
“Time.” Raef had laughed, not bitterly, but resignedly. “And how much of that do I have lef
t? Look, I’ll tell you what. You let me have a little time on my own now, to rest up and to work on a pretense I’ve got in mind. And no peeking. This is going to be something special. A surprise for you. You go work on our communications problem. I have a feeling that space station thing is something John’s been looking for. If they’re going to hear about it anytime soon, it’s going to have to be from you.”
And so she had left him, and as she did so, she tried valiantly not to pick up on the tendrils of thoughts that would have given her a hint as to his new pretense. A surprise. She didn’t want to spoil it.
Diligently, she bent her mind to other tasks. A part of her always had to strive to be aware of John and Connie, to be sure that they had consistent temperature, atmosphere, and other life support. She was able to light the corridors for them now without giving much thought to it. But speaking to them was what she needed most desperately. Resolutely she turned her thoughts inward upon herself. Raef had spoken of feeling like parts of his body were being shut down. Her problem was the opposite. She was trying to rediscover nerve circuits she had been conditioned since infancy to ignore. She retraced acts mentally. This was how I spoke to Tug. This was how he spoke to me. Here, with this, I am aware of their living quarters, of how warm or cold they are. This for their atmosphere, this for light …
“Hello?” the alto voice asked hesitantly. “Hello, can you hear me?”
The sound reminded John of a pebble dropped into a quiet pool. The echoes of it seemed to spread throughout the ship. He turned to Connie with a sensation of awakening, though neither of them had slept in the two days since they’d achieved orbit. They had cleansed themselves, and eaten, surprised at how bland the food tasted, how flat the water, but they had not slept. Of Tug, they had spoken little.
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