by Mel Keegan
Since losing his legs on the Omaru blockade. Travers knew what Vidal meant. “He and Rodman have been invited aboard the Lai’a expedition. The last I heard, they were talking about it. Shapiro wants them both, but he wants the Harlequin just as much. She’s the toughest ship, tonne for tonne, in this company, and she’ll fit in the Intrepid’s hold. Shapiro would have invited van Donne and his partners, but the Mako’s too small.” He lifted a brow at Vidal. “Roark didn’t mention which way he and Rodman are thinking?”
“No.” Vidal was flexing his shoulders and arms. “It’s the big decision, Neil. It’s not easy to make, not for Roark. He already gave more than you could ask any man to give.”
“And his new legs are growing in a tank on the Mercury,” Travers added. “They’ll be waiting for him, when we get back out of transspace.”
“If,” Vidal said darkly.
“When,” Travers corrected. “You start thinking about if, and you might as well take yourself right off the crew roster.”
But Vidal’s head shook slowly. “I never expected Jo and me to make it back. We went into it knowing we had a one in a thousand chance.”
“And here you are.”
“What’s left of us.” Vidal peered at his hands as if he hardly recognized them as his own. “Neil, there’s things I haven’t said, things I can’t –”
Marin chose that moment to step back into the bay, and Vidal let the words dwindle into silence. A pair of black silk slacks, a pale charcoal shirt with long sleeves and a high collar, which would conceal him from neck to wrists, a pair of soft-soled shoes which would smart-mold to his feet, cushioning sharp bones, a girdle of burgundy silk that would hold the shirt at his hips, stop it flapping loosely around a body grown so thin, it was little more than bones.
He knew exactly what to bring, Travers thought grimly. Vidal took the clothes from him and hesitated, casting about for some way to drop the robe and dress in private. Privacy was the last thing the medbay offered, and at last Vidal muttered,
“I’m sorry. You want to sleep nights, don’t look.”
But Travers looked anyway, and his skin prickled uncomfortably in reaction as Vidal threw the robe onto the chair. The knots of his spine pushed out like knuckles, the shape of his pelvis was visible, and the strong thighs Travers remembered were wasted, the buttocks reduced to pads hardly thick enough to cushion the bones.
“Christ, Mick,” he said hoarsely.
“Near as we could work it out, it was six months, maybe eight.” Vidal was fumbling into the clothes as swiftly as he could. “We ate when we could scavenge something that hadn’t gone rotten. Not enough, not for three of us. Not to work hard, like we did, in that kind of cold.” The slacks were loose, falling away from his waist as he shrugged into the shirt, displaying a chest like a birdcage. “Then Ernst took the fall, hurt himself bad. He wasn’t going to mend if he didn’t get rest, food, so Jo and me … well, you know.”
“We know.” Marin arranged the collar for him, forming it up around his neck, and tied the girdle around his hips, when Vidal’s hands refused to cooperate. “Trust Bill. Do you know if he’s saved your organs? It took a few transplants to pull me back from the edge.”
The blue eyes looked too large in Vidal’s face. “He’s not sure about my liver and pancreas, but the nano’s still working. I’m hoping. If they turn out to be a bust, it’ll be cloned organs and surgery. You?”
“The same.” Marin stepped back and looked him up and down. “I’m so sorry, Mick … and so glad to see you alive. You need anything, you let me know. I’ve been through this. You want me to vanish, let you and Neil be alone?”
The offer surprised Travers. Vidal’s answer surprised him even more. “No,” Mick said quietly. “You and Neil are handfasted, and I’m a ghost. I don’t even exist anymore.”
“That’s not true,” Marin protested, “even if I know what you mean. And yes, we’re handfasted. But there’s got to be things you need to say.”
“Maybe.” Vidal tried flexing his spine, moving his feet. “But not here. Somewhere, anywhere, that isn’t a sickbay. I could drink coffee, if Bill will let me have it. Get some heat back into my bones.”
They walked at his pace, not much above a shuffle, and Travers took them aft from the Infirmary to the elevators, and up two decks to the labs on the dorsal surface. Long-term experiments were cycling through numerous machines, and the wide observation panes offered views of Alshie’nya, the supergiant stars beyond, and Lai’a itself.
A ’chef was set up with beverages and snacks for the lab staff, and as Vidal stretched his legs, finding his feet little by little, Travers fetched him coffee and a genuine, yellow banana still carrying the stickers of a plantation in Velcastra’s warm south. Mick took his coffee with cream. He wrapped both hands around the mug and tried to refuse the fruit, but Travers insisted, peeled it, and held it before him until he took it.
He seemed to have forgotten what to do with food. Travers shot a glance at Marin, saw his grave expression, and Curtis said quietly, “Dunk it in the coffee and suck it.”
“Suck it?” Vidal gave him a look that would once have been sultry.
“You heard.” Marin rose to the bait. “Pretend it’s Neil.”
“Oh, please,” Travers began, surprised by the heat in his own cheeks.
“Seriously?” Vidal ignored him.
“On the level.” Marin gestured at Travers. “I believe I’ve found out how to shock him at last. And yes, suck the damn’ thing. You need to get the saliva running, get the taste buds working, get the brain chemistry going. Your brain has to remember food and recognize it, before your belly will accept it. That’s what’s going wrong right now – no gastric juices, so everything tastes like cotton and sits in your gut like sawdust.”
“Oh.” Vidal considered the fruit critically, and then dunked it dutifully and gave Travers a fatuous look as he sucked it gingerly.
The heat in Travers’s face peaked and receded. He leaned his shoulders on the bulkhead between the observation panes, and while Vidal gazed out at the incomparable view, first studied him, and then Marin, who had returned to the ’chef. “You two, uh, you’re okay?”
Marin fetched green tea for himself and Travers. “Okay together, you mean, with you here and blushing like a rose?”
“I don’t blush,” Travers protested
“Bullshit,” Vidal informed him blandly. He dunked the fruit and sucked a little more. “You know, I’m starting to taste this.”
“You’re welcome.” Marin gestured at the haphazard scatter of chairs. “You ought to sit.”
“Plastex is too hard on the tailbones,” Vidal confessed. “Can’t sit on anything without a cushion. Pathetic, isn’t it?” He took a small bite from the end of the fruit and chewed experimentally. Swallowing was an obvious effort, but he held onto the food as he looked darkly at Travers and Marin. “There’s things I didn’t tell Shapiro or Grant. Things that …” His eyes glazed for a moment.
“Mick? Mick!” Travers took his right arm, disquieted by its frailty.
The touch snapped Vidal back to reality. He took a breath, a swig of coffee. “Two words in the wrong ears, and I’ll score therapy, some institution back on Velcastra. Shapiro would sign off on the psycho discharge, and he’d probably be right to.” His voice was a rasp.
Travers had begun to wonder how much sense Vidal was making, and it was Marin who asked, “Things you did in transspace? In the lagoon where you washed up? What, Mick?” He dropped his voice, though the lab was deserted save for busy machines. The loudest sound was the whirr of cooling fans. “It’s not Shapiro you want to be talking to, it’s Mark. Whatever you saw, he can probably explain it.”
“Explain it,” Vidal echoed, and leaned heavily on the bulkhead, as if he were too tired to hold himself up.
He was weakening visibly, and Travers cast about for something that would serve as a cushion. Some tech had left a lab coat on the rack by the door. He folded it, wadded it thickly,
and slipped an arm about Vidal before he could stagger. Touching him, holding him, was a shock, and with an effort Travers refused to permit himself to flinch.
But Vidal knew, and his face twisted. Very carefully, he sat. His hands trembled, and he set the mug and fruit on the workbench beside him. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Marin pulled a second chair closer, and straddled it. “There’s times when you think you’ll never make it back. Times,” he added in a bare murmur, “when you think it would be easier to just die and get it over with. But you do come back, Mick. I did.”
For some time Vidal seemed content just to breathe, and Travers was about to suggest they return to the Infirmary when he said, “I got the others into the tanks. I could breathe their air, shut down the heat, only keep the Orpheus cockpit warm. Conserve power. And the tanks protected them … I knew I was going to get fried, getting through the field.”
“Like an event horizon,” Travers mused. “There’d have to be every kind of energy flux you can imagine off it.”
“And a lot we never saw before,” Vidal added. He seemed to be looking into some space Travers could not see. “There were things, Neil … glimpses. You see the past, other things that might be the future, crowded together, jumbled, like crap thrown in a box and scrambled around till none of it fits or makes sense.”
“Mick, let it be,” Travers began.
But Vidal did not hear him. “You get glimpses of things that never happened. You – you were busted up on the blockade, and Curtis was killed, van Donne put a bullet in his head, on the Oberon platform. I … I was beat up so bad, chasing CL 389, they took off everything below the waist and slung what was left in a biocyber armature, and I begged Alexis not to, to just let me go, but she wouldn’t, because I’m the last of the real Shackletons, the rest are like Trick and Ying. I saw the Kiev destroyed, Neil. A suicide run got through the perimeter. An asteroid miner. Hit her in the sterntubes, with two Prometheus generators on overload – she was gone in seconds, no chance to bug out, nothing, and you and me, we were there. Dead. Is that the future?” He dragged himself back to reality with a supreme effort of willpower. “I was shot down over Hydralis, the militia got me, had me for weeks. Beat the hide off me for fun, used me like a ten-credit whore, took my fingers off, for intel I didn’t even have, stuff I never knew.” His breathing was rapid, shallow. “That never happened. Is it the future? Is that what’s out there, waiting for us?”
“No,” Travers said, much too fast, when in fact he had no way of knowing what Vidal had seen. “Maybe you dreamed it, Mick. Some kind of hallucinations. The radiation flux could do that to you. Curtis told me you get nightmares when you’re – fried.” The word stuck in his throat.
“I saw what I saw,” Vidal said hoarsely. “If it’s not the future, what is it? Christ! A man could go out of his mind.” He blinked at Travers, at Marin. “Is that it? Did I go mad?”
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think so,” Marin said quietly. “And you’re right not to mention any of this to Grant or Shapiro.” He reached out, set a hand on Vidal’s frail shoulder. “Will you let me talk to Mark about this? In absolute confidence. I think,” he added thoughtfully, “what you’re reporting here could be valuable, and I have an idea Mark might be expecting to hear it.”
He was calming, soothed by the sane, rational balm of Marin’s voice. “All right.” He picked up the mug, drank a little, and regarded the fruit with a glare. “I’m pathetic.”
“You’re sick,” Travers argued, “and if you don’t let Grant do his stuff, you’re going to continue to be sick. It’ll do no one any good, Mick. The truth is, we need you and Queneau. You’re the only human transspace pilots that ever flew – ever existed. Rabelais was just along for the ride, but you two? You flew it.”
A little life leaked back into Vidal’s eyes, banishing the edge of madness. “We did,” he whispered, “and we can do it again.”
“With a big ship under you,” Marin added. “Lai’a can handle it, but I wouldn’t like to place my faith in a machine, not even one like Lai’a. Halfway between the Orpheus Gate and Orion 359, something goes wrong, the AI gridlocks and hangs, and what are you gong to do next?”
“Fly it.” Vidal’s eyes moistened, and he brushed away the tears with bony fingers.
“Infirmary,” Travers suggested.
“All right.” Vidal drank a little more and set the mug aside. “I’ll be good.”
“You have three days back to Velcastra at the best speed the Wastrel can make,” Neil reasoned. “If you want Bill to let you out on your own, you have to be a hell of a lot better than this. I don’t like what I’m seeing, Mick. You’re scaring me.”
“And me,” Vidal added, and glanced at Marin. “He knows.”
“Oh, he knows,” Marin agreed, lending his hands to help Vidal get back to his feet, steadying him when he was there. “If you need to talk, call me. And we’ll talk to Mark about … that.”
“Yeah.” Vidal leaned heavily on Travers’s shoulders, too tired to hold up his head. “Hey, you guys want to help me get back there? I don’t think I can do this.”
In fact, he walked into the Infirmary on his own feet, but a meddrone maneuvered a gurney under him before he could stumble, and Travers was grateful to have him back on his bed while Grant had stepped out for a few moments. Queneau was asleep. Rabelais was watching, but Travers knew he would say nothing to Grant, and unless Bill watched the surveillance vids, he would never know how far Vidal had driven himself.
That stubborn streak would fetch him back, Travers thought. He was on the very edge now, but three days to Velcastra would get him mobile, get his physical processes functioning, and when Lai’a slipped back through the Orpheus Gate, he would be working out, eating, rebuilding the Michael Vidal they had known. The drones moved the IV back into place, and while Travers watched, the tube slid into the cannula. Vidal sank into the pillows with a groan and closed his eyes.
He was about to apologize again, but Travers laid one finger on his mouth to stop him. “Don’t say it. Get some sleep. I’ll ask Mark to come in and talk to you. You want Roark and Asako to stop by?”
“Later,” Vidal whispered. “Much later.”
He was asleep when Travers gave the watchful, silent Rabelais a companionable nod, and followed Marin out of the Infirmary. They were too preoccupied to speak, and when they stepped into the lift, Curtis thumbed for deck two, and the physics labs.
The big lab had been completely turned over to the daunting work of assembling a navtank load which would be sensible to humans and Resalq. Lai’a had observed enough to be indifferent to the transspace labyrinth, but even Jazinsky and Mark Sherratt still struggled with it, and for the sake of safety, a navtank would be loaded before the expedition launched. As Marin had said, the unexpected and unknown were the greatest dangers. If disaster overtook Lai’a far on the other side of the Orpheus Gate, a human crew must be able to pick up the threads.
The transspace pilot was a new breed, Travers thought as he and Marin stepped into Physics One. If Rabelais had been the pathfinder who charted much of the region around Hellgate, Vidal and Queneau had written themselves into history as the pilots who took humanity into Elarne.
The lab was dim, with a four-meter threedee running a realtime simulation of a region of transspace which challenged Travers’s belly. From the door, he and Marin seemed to gaze into a void bisected by a writhing, seething serpent’s nest of tracks or conduits which resembled the tentacles of a fifty-armed squid. There was no clear sense of up or down, and his middle ear protested as parts of the simulation appeared to uncoil only to coil right back up again, as if time were rewinding itself.
On the far side of the threedee Mark stood in the shadows, watching the mess unblinkingly. Jazinsky was hip-deep in the display, as if standing in a pool, while tracks which might have represented distance, speed or time arched high over her head, split into three and four forks and raced away at increasing speed. She murmured a s
eries of numbers, and Mark shook his head. “No. That doesn’t work either.” She turned, watched the convolutions of the display from a different angle, and murmured a string of gibberish which seemed to be sourced from various dead human languages as well as Resalq. “Closer,” Mark mused. “I don’t think it’s directional data at all, Barb. I’ve tried substituting a temporal component for one of the topographic parameters, but it only skews the results further. Unless…” He looked up at her as she turned toward him. “A negative time index.”
“Shit,” Jazinsky breathed, “I don’t even want to go there. Physicists used to get these phantom numbers when they were struggling to build bridges away from the fundamental Newtonian and Einsteinian models. We used to monkey about with them in grade school, see who could tie the cosmos in the biggest, dumbest knots.”
“Phantom numbers?” Mark echoed. “Who says they’re phantom?”
She tipped back her head, massaged her neck. “You’re not suggesting time is actually going to run backwards?”
“In microcosmic bubbles, inside of self-generating event horizons, under monstrous gravities, within the transspace stratum,” Mark said slowly, “I wouldn’t want to make any rule about what’s possible and not. Three weeks from now, I could look like a complete idiot. Take a break, Barb. We’re both tired. We’ll run it again in an hour.”
“Etienne, put it on hold,” she said tersely.
The sim faded to nothing, leaving the lab dim, humid, too warm. “Lights,” Mark said, aside to the AI. “Now, that’s a worried look, Curtis.”
“Is it?” Marin’s brows arched. “Mark, can we talk?”
“Of course,” Mark said quickly. “Barb, would you mind?”
“No – I gotta get out of here for a while before I go buggo.” Jazinsky dragged both hands through her hair. “I’m starting to feel like a cave bat.” She gave Travers a curious glance. “You look like hell Neil. What’s the problem?”
