After a while, Red got control of herself. She sat up and twisted her body until the sticky patch on the back beltline of her jumpsuit stuck to the holding pad of a workstation arm the Christmas Bush had swung out for her. Now she could stay beside the bed without drifting away. She looked at Thomas's closed eyes with concern, then turned to the Christmas Bush.
"He's just sleeping," said James, "but it won't be long now. In his weakened condition his usually benign sickle-cell anemia condition is flaring up and aggravating his other problems."
Red took Thomas's hand and waited, occasionally brushing him on the cheek with a wrinkled, freckled hand.
GEORGE WAS in his bed, staring up at the viewscreen in the ceiling and scanning through an old science fiction novel, Dragons Egg. He'd read it many times before, but it was so full of scientific tidbits that he always enjoyed dipping into it before going to sleep. His favorite part was when the alien "cheela" came up from the surface of a neutron star to visit the humans in orbit above them, riding on miniature black holes.
George heard the rustle and the occasional odd noise of Elizabeth coming up the shaft. He looked out his open door to watch Red rise up out of the floor and bring herself to a halt at the railing. Instead of going to her door, however, she circled around the railing ringing the lift shaft and disappeared behind the edge of his door. He heard the splat of a human palm on the wall, the sibilant hiss of a compartment door sliding shut, and the deadly click of a bolt. He sat up under his tension sheet as his imp whispered in his ear.
"She wanted to tell you herself," James said.
Red appeared at his door, an inward strength glowing in the tall, green-suited body. Her red hair glistened in the bright corridor light as she said, "There's just the two of us now, George. Can I come in?"
"Sure," he said. "Just a second and I'll get dressed."
"Don't bother," she replied. "I just don't want to sleep alone tonight." She came over to the bed and, kicking off her corridor boots, climbed in under the tension sheet, her back to him.
"Just hold me," she pleaded, and George put the grizzled arm of an old man around the stricken woman and lay his head on the pillow next to hers, his imp scrambling around to his other shoulder as he did so. He closed his eyes and went to sleep, while James turned off the scan book, the bedroom light, and closed the corridor door.
ANOTHER year passed. George was now hanging loosely from a pylon on the control deck, monitoring the video data links from the deep space probes in the outreaches of Barnard. The screens showed little that was new, and James could have handled the data by itself, but George insisted on viewing all the scenes that differed in any significant aspect from those that had been seen before. A typical scene of frozen blackness on a distant moon nearly forty light-minutes away had changed to a scene of frozen grayness. The computer had asked the human element in its loop to evaluate the situation.
"Nothing here, James," George said. "Just another mound of dirty ice."
The screen flashed to a new scene, one that had been held up while the previous ones had been evaluated. George scanned the picture, looking for anything that the well-trained senses of the computer might have missed. Suddenly, his eyes caught a flash of green out of the corner of his eye, and he turned to see a tumbled mass of green-colored satin clothing converging on his face. He brushed away the intruding jumpsuit and underwear just in time to see two tantalizing white mounds swim out of sight behind the control room door, tiny pink feet propelling them on their way.
It didn't take long. Within ten seconds he was stripped to the uniform that the "Game" called for and was searching through the downs and outs of the corridors that had made their life a heaven in the stars. They had tried other hiding spots, but the best—yes, the very best—was the exercise room.
George found her behind the exercise mats. She thought she was stretched out enough to be as invisible as a pea under the many thick mattresses. He noticed the slight mound, however, and, his body rising to the occasion, dove under the layers of mats and pulled a squealing, skinny, red-haired vixen into the open.
"Stop!" she cried. She twisted expertly in the air, trying to break his single handhold.
Her struggles to retreat were defeated by a single brushing kiss that he implanted on the tips of her hair. It was his turn to run now, and he bounded off the wall and entered the dim lounge that led to one of the video rooms. She smiled and stopped at the lift-shaft, her lithe naked body relaxing for a moment, clad in nothing but her glittering imp hairpiece. She waited, scanning the tumble of furniture and panels in the lounge, then dived full speed at a bulky gray form bouncing from one panel to another, his glittering imp hanging desperately onto his naked shoulder with all six paws. She caught him in midflight as they tumbled through the door into one of the video rooms.
Their play had risen to ecstasy ... the dim lights of the video room adding to their games ... they were coupled ... her face flushed with pleasure until it was almost the color of her hair. Her body arched back ...
"RED! GEORGE!! STOP!!!" imps shouted in their ears.
"Goddamnit, James!" George exploded with fury. "Can't you stay out." He grabbed the handful of brittle sticks from their perch on his naked shoulder and flung them at the far wall. The mangled twigs and wires hummed to a halt about a meter from his hand and buzzed back past him—heading toward Elizabeth.
George looked quickly around and watched his small wisp of imp merge into the imp on the side of Red's face, a face gasping for breath and wide-eyed with agony. He turned at another sound, a deep thrumming in the air. A thicket of brightly glittering sticks and twigs hit the two of them amidships and thrust him aside.
The fuzzy hands of the Christmas Bush then attempted to press life into Red's naked curvaceous chest, while a dense cluster of cilia pumped a pulsating stream of air into her lax mouth. The Christmas Bush worked on Red for a number of minutes, then the automatic motion finally stopped. Not abruptly, not slowly, but like some automaton given both stop and start signals at the same time.
"She is dead," said James, finally stopping.
"NO!" shouted George. "Don't stop! Save her! Do something!" He reached out and started pulling the Christmas Bush off her. "She can't die! I won't let her die!!"
"There is nothing either you or I can do," replied James calmly. "She has suffered a massive cerebral aneurysm."
"Oh ..." said George, his hands coming to a halt.
He let go of the Christmas Bush and ran his fingertips tenderly up over Red's face while he slowly calmed himself down.
"Thanks for trying,'' he finally said. He moved back and floated motionless, eyes staring longingly at her face.
"Are you okay?" said James, a large chunk of Christmas Bush breaking loose from the slowly falling nude to hover at a distance from him.
"I'm fine, James," George said, finally recovering. "Just take care of her, will you?" He went off to cry in a quiet place, his imp reforming unobtrusively on his naked shoulder as he left.
JAMES WAITED patiently. George's grief eventually shed itself in a floating stream of sparkling spheres. George's imp tenderly flicked each tear from around his red-rimmed eyes, launching the drops toward the nearby air intake ducts. There was still a deep emptiness in him, however. That void would only be filled by the wash of tears from the intermittent floods of emotional catharsis that would return again and again in the weeks, months, and years ahead. The loss of the others had been hard, but there had always been someone to share the grief with. This loss he would bear alone.
When George finished his crying, he found himself in the starside science dome, lying back in the control chair and looking outward at the distant yellow star studding the end of Orion's belt. He had decided to get all the misery out of his system at one time and had deliberately worked up a good case of homesickness to add to his loneliness. He now had cried himself out, and getting up calmly, he floated away from the chair as it folded itself into its niche in the wall. He called for the elevat
or to take him to the control deck.
"I'd like to read a few words before you put her in cold storage, James," he said quietly to his imp.
"Red left some last wishes with me, as a verbal will," said James. "She didn't want her body to stay on board Prometheus with the others—even if there was a chance that someday it could be returned to Earth. She has no family or friends there. She felt more at home around this strange red star and wants to be buried here."
"A sailor of the skies, her body cast into the deep," mused George. "Okay. I'll look up a sea captain's farewell."
"It's going to be more complicated than that, George. She wants to be cremated in the star."
"We can't do that. If we put her out a port, she'll go into orbit," said George, puzzled. Suddenly, he looked up.
"Of course!" he said "I forgot what kind of ship we're in."
"Shall I decelerate and assume a hovering orbit?" said James.
"Yes," said George. "How long will it take?"
"Two weeks. Less if you don't mind feeling a few percent of gee."
"Sure! I can take the gees!" grumbled George. "I may be old, but I'm not decrepit—you obsolete hunk of frayed wires and diffusing silicon. What'll we do with Red in the meantime? Put her in cold storage with the others?"
"Yes, we'll have to," replied James. "But before that, I'll have to make some preparations. She gave explicit instructions on what she was to wear and how her hair and makeup were to be done. The Christmas Bush is working on that now in the sick bay."
"I want to help," said George, pushing himself over to the lift-shaft as the computer began to tilt the huge sail to slow its orbit about the star.
"Are you sure?" asked James, with a concerned overtone in its voice. "I am perfectly capable of handling the whole thing myself."
"Yes!" said George gruffly. He padded into the sick bay and approached the still-naked body strapped lightly to the table. The thick red hair that was Red's crowning glory was now full of twigs from the Christmas Bush. One small clump of the Bush was controlling a plastic squeezer full of a reddish liquid and spraying a mist into the air. Each tiny droplet was snatched individually by the cilia on the twigs, carried to the base of each hair stalk, applied to the root, then carefully wiped off, as the few millimeters of gray hair became as red as the rest.
"I don't think she would have wanted you to see this," rumbled the Christmas Bush.
"She never fooled anyone," George replied. "We never talked about Red dyeing her hair, but we all knew that she did, and knew that everyone else knew, too."
James hesitated a little at that statement. It quickly sifted through sixty-eight years of conversation picked up and recorded by its imps. George was right. No one on the ship had ever talked with anyone else about Red's hair. They must have understood each other from facial expressions.
"I still have a lot to learn about humans," was the summary judgment it entered into its memory.
James let George brush, comb, and arrange Red's hair, but insisted on doing the makeup itself.
"She would come back and haunt me if I allowed you to mess up her lip line," James joked.
As they were finishing, one limb of the Christmas Bush appeared with a set of green satin clothing and a long pair of alligator-hide boots.
"Where'd those boots come from?" said George in surprise.
"She brought them on board as part of her personal baggage allotment," James replied. "She was planning to wear them for parties, but she forgot that her ankles swell in free-fall. After trying to get them on a few times, she gave up and shoved them in the back of her storage locker. Her last instructions about them were very explicit. I recorded them."
Red's voice emerged from the vibrating cilla at the tips of the Christmas Bush as the computer replayed the exact sequence of bits which it had recorded in that long-ago conversation. "I want those boots on when I go out the port. Even if you have to cut off my feet to get them on. But don't you dare stretch them.'"
George winced visibly as he heard Red's hauntingly beautiful contralto emitted from the glowing Bush, "Please don't ever do that again," he finally said.
"I'm sorry," said James in a subdued whisper.
A few minutes of firm pressure on Red's lower legs by the massive paws of the Christmas Bush allowed the green leather to slide over the sheer green stockings. There was even plenty of room to tuck in the legs of the green satin slacks. As they were putting on Red's shirt, the Christmas Bush stopped, reached into a breast pocket, and took out a gold coin. It handed the coin to George.
"She didn't say what to do with this," James said. "I guess you should keep it."
"I'm sure I can think of a thousand ways to spend a sixty-billion-dollar gold coin in this thriving metropolis," remarked George sarcastically. He took the coin, folded it up carefully in one of Red's hands and crossed her arms across her chest. He leaped up toward the ceiling, hung onto the light fixture, and stared down at her critically.
"She looks fine," he said. "Now take her away before I get all soppy and smear her makeup."
The Christmas Bush picked up the stiffening body and headed for the lift-shaft as George, floating slowly downward from the ceiling, watched them go.
AS THE days passed, the huge sail tilted, then tilted back again. George noticed that the maneuver took almost two weeks, and that after the first day the acceleration had subtly changed from its earlier high level. He couldn't blame James for trying to take care of an eighty-eight-year-old man and let the computer get away with trying to fool him. Finally, the ship was hovering over the star. The light from the red globe shot straight up through the bottom science dome and illuminated the ceiling of the control deck. The ship was slowly drifting downward, for the star's gravity was slightly stronger than the push of the light on the sail.
George had been looking through the library for a suitable eulogy for Red. He had skimmed through the Bible and the prayer books for three religions, but hadn't found anything that really suited. Then he remembered a phrase. It was simple and short, and spoke of their last years together in this structure that was a combination of home and prison and tomb. He couldn't recall the exact words, however, and all of his reconstruction attempts seemed to lack the poignancy of the original.
The name of the author also persisted in eluding his searching thoughts, and it took George nearly four hours to track the phrase down with the help of James's library program. He finally found it, then realized why his brain had refused to come up with the source. He found the phrase in the humor section. The author was Mark Twain.
George followed the Christmas Bush in the two-percent gravity as it put the frosty body of the beautiful red-haired woman into the airlock and closed the inner door. The Christmas Bush waited, its colored lights blinking, while George read in a husky voice the words he had carefully copied onto a slip of paper.
"Wheresoever she was, there was Eden."
James, overriding the airlock controls, activated the outer door with the lock still pressurized. The rush of air twirled the body out the hatch, one elbow striking the side of the lock as it left. The last thing George saw before his eyes filled again with tears was a distant figure in frosted green, and between them, just outside the airlock door, flashes of red-gold light reflected from a spinning disk of metal. The coin was slowly dropping sunward as the sailcraft hovered above the all-consuming fire below.
Twenty-four hours and fifty-eight minutes later, the energy in a gold coin, a green-clad figure, and a misplaced alligator from Earth became a burst of photons bathing the farthest reaches of the universe with a minute flash of luminance.
IT WAS two years later when George first picked up the beacon signal from the incoming space vehicle, Succor, carrying the crew of the follow-on mission. After coasting for a decade it had turned around and started to brake. It was decelerating rapidly as it neared Barnard, but it still had a year of thrusting to go before it stopped. George radioed the news to Maria, who had taken over her mother's pla
ce at the Eden communications post. This far from the planet there was a delay of several minutes and conversation was almost impossible, so George did little more than pass the Succor's message along.
Maria signed off. George had made it clear that the Succor was still almost a year away from Eden, but here on Eden it was time—time for the firstborn to call a meeting.
"WHAT IS this all about?" asked Reiki as she and Richard met Cinnamon and Nels at the door of the Meeting Hall. "Freeman just said we should come."
"I don't know," said Cinnamon, honestly puzzled. "The kids made it sound serious."
"Instead of wondering," said Nels querulously, "why don't we go in and find out." Using his two canes, Nels pulled himself up the step and into the building. His arthritis had grown progressively worse, and he once again had to use the strength of his arms to move about. Lately the ache had been gripping his fingers, and Nels feared losing all mobility. The pain and anxiety had turned the normally placid man peevish and sullen.
Cinnamon looked after him with anguish-filled eyes. She knew that he was in pain, and there was nothing she could do to help him. The anti-inflammatory drugs that had been included in the last drop from Prometheus could ease the discomfort, but could do little to stop the progress of the debilitating disease. A cure for arthritis had been developed back on Earth, but James was incapable of manufacturing the cure. She followed him into the Meeting Hall.
Reiki entered on Richard's arm. They stopped just inside the door and looked around in surprise. The hall was packed. Everyone over sixteen was sitting there, silently waiting. The children have called a meeting, thought Reiki. Up to now, only the original castaways had called meetings. But then these were no longer children. The firstborn were over twenty-one, and many now had children of their own.
Adam waited until the old folks were seated and then he rose to his feet. When the parents first reached Eden they had devised a very simple rule governing debates. Each person was allowed to speak without interruption. No one, however, was obliged to stay and listen. Adam took a deep breath, calming himself. Only by approaching this gently would he be able to keep the parents here and in their seats until he had said all that he needed to; until they had heard it all and understood.
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