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Walking on the Sea of Clouds

Page 22

by Gray Rinehart


  They’d all practiced stitching wounds—on a dead pig. Faced with the need to do it on a living person, Stormie wavered. She went for the easy out. “Let’s find someone who hasn’t practically been quarantined down here.”

  Rex shook his increasingly pale head. “Call for backup, if you’re nervous, but let’s get started while I still have some blood in me.” He grabbed a bandage and held his hand together while Stormie called Central on the intercom. He searched around the tiny kitchen.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked after Central acknowledged her call.

  He raised his voice above the ensuing PA announcement. “I was wondering if there was any booze tucked away in one of these cabinets. A shot of courage, you might say.”

  Stormie opened the sterile package of a curved needle paired with long surgical silk. She flipped the top off a can of antiseptic analgesic foam and applied a dose to Rex’s hand. He sighed as the fast-acting medicine numbed the wound.

  “What are you talking about?” Stormie said. “I thought you and Maggie were all religious.” They were the ones who conducted services on Sunday, at least. Stormie didn’t know how many people attended, and had no intention of finding out.

  “Well, Paul told Timothy to take some wine to help his stomach,” Rex said. “This wouldn’t be too different. Although that stuff you put on there works wonders. It tingles.”

  “So, are you ready for this?”

  “Are you?”

  Stormie positioned herself in the light as best she could. She held Rex’s hand with the skin pushed together, trying not to bunch it up too much. In her other hand she gripped the little pliers—forceps, she told herself—the needle pinched in its jaws. She touched the needle to Rex’s hand—and backed away. White noise in her ears drowned out Rex’s encouragement; his lips moved, but she wasn’t sure what he said. She took a deep breath.

  The needle tip pressed, dimpled, then punctured the skin; she pushed against the soft resistance under the skin, and harder until the tip emerged from the far side of the wound. It was farther than she’d intended it to go, but she let it be. Breath hissed, and she wasn’t sure if it was her sigh of relief or him hissing in discomfort. She gripped the protruding end of the needle and pulled it through. The silk dragged through the skin like dental floss around a dirty tooth.

  “Need any help?” Yvette Fiester asked.

  “Nah,” Rex said. “Stormie’s doing fine.”

  “Like hell I am,” she said as she tied the knot. It was ugly, but it would hold. “Put on some gloves and take over.”

  Yvette complied, as Stormie trusted she would: as a licensed radiologist, she’d done her share of stitching during her intern days and had gone through full EMT training before signing on with the program. She was another independent contractor, slated to perform nondestructive x-ray inspections and burn PROMs for different equipment applications. By necessity and by design, Yvette would multi-task as the closest thing the early colony would get to a general practitioner.

  Stormie backed away and watched Yvette work. Rex grabbed Stormie’s hand and squeezed it, hard. He smiled when she looked at him. She repaid in kind.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You did good.”

  “Thank you,” Stormie said. It was all she could say, and it didn’t say all she wanted. She glanced away and noticed that Harmony Adamson and Onata Bonaccio had crowded in the room to watch.

  “Stay here and talk to me while she does her work,” Rex said. “Take my mind off of it.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Yvette said, “as long as she swabs away some of this blood so I can see what I’m doing.” Stormie did as asked, content to watch the smooth speed with which Yvette worked. Her stitches were smaller, tighter, and closer together than Stormie could ever have achieved.

  “Okay,” Stormie said. “What do you want to talk about?”

  Rex sighed. “I don’t know. The Consorts haven’t come in to take your blood lately—I guess it’s been a month or more. Did they finally admit you and Frank weren’t contagious?”

  The way he looked at her, he might know more than he was telling. Whatever he knew, Stormie appreciated his voice of support, especially since Onata had been one of Stormie’s most vocal detractors when the Consortium thought she was infected. Stormie answered with a question that she hoped didn’t sound too challenging. “Is that why you felt safe asking me to help you?”

  Rex waved with his good hand. “Ah, no. Maggie and I knew you were okay. We figured they’d relent eventually.”

  “Thanks, Rex.”

  “Can’t say as we would’ve done anything differently, from what we’ve heard. Might not’ve been the first people to help, but we’ve always tried to do what we could when we could. I remember we were driving to our honeymoon, we were heading down to Arkansas to the Ozarks, had barely made it past Nebraska City … we were driving in the back woods at night, and came over a hill and saw a red-orange glow at the curve coming up. When we got there, people were running around, yelling, and a big woman came up to our car and said, ‘You’ve got to help ’em, they’re burning up!’ There was a car off to the right that had hit a fence post but looked okay, but on the other side was a truck down in the field, burning, and a Jeep closer in that was burning, too.

  “There was a fellow just this side of the Jeep, on the ground, and I got to him and dragged him across the road. It was hot enough that just getting to him I singed the hair off the backs of my hands, but I didn’t notice until later. I couldn’t get near enough to the Jeep to help the person in it, on account of the heat. And I kept hearing pops every once in a while, but it took me a little while to figure out what they were.”

  “What were they?” Stormie asked.

  “Fellows in the truck had been hunting, and their ammunition was cooking off in the fire.” Rex looked down at his hand. Yvette had turned it and was working on the palm. He seemed calm and his color was better, and he nodded a little as if he had just come to a conclusion. He looked at Stormie and winked; she looked down and wiped away the last trickle of blood as Yvette tied off one more stitch.

  “Thing I remember most about that night,” Rex said, “is a little boy off to the side of the road, watching the truck burning in the field. He must’ve been about ten or eleven. Every time one of those bullets would pop off, he’d jump a little. I thought maybe he was a farmboy, just stopped by to see what happened, but he wasn’t.

  “Found out that it was his uncle’s truck, and he’d been riding in the bed and got thrown out when the accident happened. He didn’t have a scratch on him that I could see, but the look in his eyes …” His voice faded and he shook his head. He made a show of studying the new stitches in his hand and said, “Sometimes it’s the wounds you can’t see that hurt the most. And sometimes the wounds you can see matter the least.”

  Yvette applied more antiseptic foam and started wrapping Rex’s hand in a bandage. She said, “Stormie, pull off some tape so we can cover this mess, then let’s get this room cleaned up. Rex, what we’ve done here is fine for a field dressing, but I think a good surgeon is going to have to work on your hand.”

  Rex narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, you’re probably right. Wonder if I can get a waiver on the last few days down here.”

  “Not likely,” Onata said from her onlooker post by the doorway.

  Yvette said, “Onata, how about you and Harmony give us some room so we can get this cleaned up?”

  Stormie tore off a strip of adhesive tape; the rip echoed in the small chamber. She handed the strip to Yvette, but looked at Onata. “Better yet,” Stormie said, “why not grab a mop and help clean up?”

  Onata laughed—a sharp, short, attacking laugh. “I don’t think so, Stormie,” she said. She looked around where the spatters, drops, and outright puddles were now smeared across the table, floor, and countertop. “Some of that might be your blood. It’s not worth the risk.”

  Heat rose from Stormie’s belly, through her chest and up her neck like magm
a building under a volcano, but it wasn’t painful memory-heat: it was embarrassment mixed with slow-boiling anger. She took a step toward Onata.

  Yvette grabbed Stormie’s hand, and their gloves stuck together like magnets. An instant later, Harmony grabbed her arm.

  “Let it go, Stormie,” said Rex. “It’s over.”

  Is it? Stormie bit back on the words, and they tasted like old collard greens that had been boiled far too long.

  Onata strode out of the little kitchen. Stormie was vaguely aware of other people out in the corridor, but she registered only Rex, sitting at the little table holding his damaged hand at an angle in front of him, and the two women holding on to her.

  It wasn’t over, even though these few had reached out to her. Maybe they thought she was okay, like Rex said, but maybe they were afraid and just masking it.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Scientific Purposes

  Sunday, 25 February 2035

  Lunar Colonist Group 2, Training Day 84

  Lunar Colonist Group 3, Training Day 21

  Van waited in his seat by the outer wall as the crowd emptied out of the “big room” after Sunday worship. Barbara walked forward to talk to the Stewart fellow who ran the service. Van was impressed by the man’s resilience: just forty-eight hours ago the Consortium evacuated Stewart to Salt Lake City for surgeons to repair his hand, and here he’d been waving it about like nothing was wrong. If he’d ever been a literal Bible thumper, the big bandage on his hand must’ve been enough to quell that temptation. He and his wife had orchestrated a tidy little service, with some nice music played out of her datapad—one odd little number about having church on the Moon, but it was pretty—and slides everyone could download off the server if they wanted. Stewart’s preaching seemed competent, and Van couldn’t fault anything the man had said; but that was probably because he couldn’t remember much of it.

  He leaned his head back, looked up into the lights, and listened as the roar of conversation against the recorded recessional faded to a few scattered murmurs. He’d tried to follow the sermon, out of common courtesy, but his mind worked too fast and went in too many different directions. Van liked Stewart well enough to feel a little remorseful at not paying better attention. Before Stewart had sliced up his hand, Van had watched him work in the simulator, and in the actual tunneling practice in pressure suits deeper in the mine, and had decided Stewart would be good to have around—even if he was an old Navy guy.

  Van chuckled. He and Barbara were the only Air Force veterans in their training class, and with Gary Needham were the only blue-suiters in the entire program so far. Paul Timmons and Nadia Capell were the only Army vets in Group Three, although a couple in the previous groups had rolled along with the caissons. Arvati Peterson, who’d gone through Group One, was the only Marine he knew of. Most of the prospective colonists were Navy types like Stewart, and most of them were submariners—already used to living in close quarters for extended periods of time. It made sense, in a way that annoyed Van and most of the blue-suiters he knew.

  Ah, we shouldn’t complain—it’s not like we were really in the military. Most of us, anyway.

  Barbara and Stewart were still talking. Part of him wanted to eavesdrop, but he ignored that part as he looked around at the makeshift chapel. He hadn’t seen it, but he was sure one of the shipping crates up at Mercator was labeled in quasi-military fashion “Kit, Chapel Supply, 1 each” and had everything from crucifixes to prayer wheels—maybe even a Torah. During the setup mission he’d teased Roy Chesterfield that he could just lie on his back to face Mecca, since the Earth was always overhead, but aside from the Stewarts and a few others, he wasn’t sure who of the trainees was what in terms of religion.

  Three little knots of people were still in the room. Two merged and set off in one direction, while the third, still independent, moved more slowly the other way. Off to Sunday brunch?

  Van stretched. He’d let them enjoy the break, because they wouldn’t get many once they landed. They would learn that lesson if something went wrong here in the mountain, like what he’d dealt with in the Turtle coming back from the Halfway House; but he doubted the AC would ever let things spin that far out of control in a training environment. Which was okay by him: even with his training responsibilities, this was a damn sight easier than the sleep-deprivation and marathon work schedule he’d just finished a few weeks ago.

  From the far end of the room Mercer Romero, the wiry little mechanical engineer in their training group, waved at Van to get his attention and gave him a come-with-us gesture. Van shook his head and gave Romero a maybe-next-time wave. He’d stay and wait for Barbara; besides, he liked Romero but wasn’t sure he would make it through the program. He didn’t seem to have the fortitude.

  A slug of quiet discontent fell into Van’s gut, like a glob of snot down the back of his throat. He ought to have a little more say in who passed the program. Who in this group knew better what it took to live and work there? He needed to talk to Gary about it—now that Gary was on station, and really starting to run the show, he had to have some clout with the bureaucrats.

  The big room was almost empty now, and a few stragglers came in and started setting the workstations back up. Barbara headed back his way.

  “So, you volunteering to run the church service after the Stewarts leave?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” she said, and held out her hand as if she would help him up out of his chair. He let her.

  “You should’ve invited the preacher to lunch. We could’ve gotten a big dose of holiness, last us all week.”

  “Very funny,” Barbara said. They stepped into the junction on the way toward their cabin. “Actually, he invited us to lunch but I said maybe next time.”

  “That’s a pretty easy promise, since they’ll be gone in two days.”

  “Don’t you think I know that? But in a few months we’ll all be together again.”

  Van smiled at her confident tone. “Yes, we will.”

  * * *

  Friday, 2 March 2035

  Lunar Colonist Group 2, Training Day 89

  Lunar Colonist Group 3, Training Day 26

  All eight of the remaining couples in Group Two counted down the last days. Their smiles grew wider as it became clearer that they all would graduate from this stage of the training—though Stormie still drew dark looks from a few of her classmates, including Onata Bonaccio.

  After her abortive attempt at fixing Rex’s hand, Stormie spent a good deal of her free time with the Stewarts during the last week. On the night of Rex’s surgery, she had taken advantage of Maggie’s preoccupation by trouncing her in several rounds of cribbage; to her consternation, the two of them returned the favor three consecutive nights after he got back. By then her guilt had been assuaged and their company wore thin; it had been so long since she’d spent any time with Frank’s family that she had nearly forgotten how predictable and saccharine-sweet the truly devout could be. When Rex mentioned playing bridge together once they were all on station, she said she doubted their respective work schedules would mesh enough. She told herself that since she controlled her work schedule—and Frank’s—she would make sure they didn’t.

  So she returned to her regular routines, and day followed night and their last day dawned. Not that they saw the dawn, but Stormie ached to see the Sun.

  A few Group Three trainees came to see them off, but not many. The real treat was the call from four colonists at the Mercator base itself: Gary Needham, the construction foreman and superintendent; his wife Beverly, a communications technician who was also a nurse; Alice Lindsey, an electrician who also maintained pressure suits; and Chuck Springer, chief operator at the main oxygen plant. They offered congratulations and emphasized that they would, as Needham said, “leave enough work for you that you won’t have to worry about being bored.”

  After the goodbyes and good lucks had been said, Stormie cycled with Frank through the little airlock and into the evacuated mine shaft. They wa
ited for a few others and went through the big airlock with the Stewarts and Jake and Harmony Adamson.

  On the other side, finally free of the training facility, they cheered as they stripped off the pressure suits. Stormie’s face hurt from smiling as they rode the elevator to the top of the tunnel, and as they stepped outside into the clear, cold Utah evening wearing borrowed parkas and carrying the few personal belongings they’d brought with them. Snow lay thick where it had drifted or been plowed aside. The hairs in Stormie’s nose crisped. The twilight glow to the west, behind the mountains, robbed Stormie of her glimpse of the Sun, but she didn’t care. The eastern sky was already dark, the first few stars lighting up what would soon be thick swathes of prickly light. The Moon had set earlier in the day, and she wouldn’t get a chance to see their new home unless she stayed up after midnight.

  Frank looked miserable.

  Stormie hugged him, and rubbed her nose against his cheek. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “I had almost hoped that we would step out of the mine and onto a plane headed to Kourou. I am not looking forward to the next few weeks.”

  They stowed their carefully-packed bags and found seats on the charter bus that would take them to Salt Lake City. Stormie leaned her head on Frank’s shoulder and said, “I understand. I’m not looking forward to visiting your parents, either.”

  His look said he didn’t appreciate her joke. He knew, of course, that she was only half-joking.

  “Not that,” he said. “The time in New Mexico. You know how much I hate the desert.”

  She knew. Frank’s childhood recollections always contrasted the dust and haze and busy streets of Nairobi with the little garden that had been his mother’s passion. And when his father brought the family to Louisiana, where he managed construction projects on the Air Force Base near Shreveport, Frank thrived in the heat and humidity and loved the occasional storms that ranged north from the Gulf of Mexico. But his dislike for the desert came primarily from the year he’d spent in Pueblo, Colorado, working on environmental compliance for the railroad association’s Transportation Technology Center. He liked the job itself, since his father had introduced him to HO-scale trains years ago, and he even admitted to Stormie that the desert had its own stark beauty; but he hated the dry air that cracked his lips and the palms of his hands, and the dust that coated everything in fine brown powder. That had done as much as anything to convince him to go back to school and get his Masters.

 

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