Wanbli said yes, because both of these sound reasons faded before the chance to be part of something so historic as the recovery of a sleeper ship.
“There’s no need for pressure suits, Red. Just your warmest woollies.” Edward grinned at Wanbli’s ignorance. “If we all had to go in suited, we wouldn’t dare bring along an… untrained person. The reason we waited so long to go in was to stabilize enough to run a tube. We only have to walk. The difficulty for you will be lack of gravity.”
Indeed, it was a difficulty. It meant shoes again. Wanbli shoved his feet into the magnetic-soled cloth shoes, which were the same color as the khaki uniform which made his neck itch. Then, because the pressure against his toes and instep was intolerable, he took his knife and cut slits in the fabric over the spots that chafed worst.
He met Edward with Greta and approximately ten other revivalists at a port in the hull he had never yet seen opened. Only Edward Pierce was vacuum-suited. “You look like an old man with bunions,” said Edward, pointing at the the workings of the sphincter.
“I feel like an old man,” Wanbli said.
Nobody spoke for a while.
“I certainly hope this is the right carrier.” It was interesting to note that Greta, who had no Hindi, was also not native in Old Ang. Her voice had peculiar inflections.
“You’re the research leader. You should know,” answered another. The sphincter dilated halfway, stuck, and was finally pounded with a closed fist until the blockage jarred loose. The tube tunnel was ferrous and lights shone from the walls. (A person might as well be underground.) One after another, the revivalists stepped through, lifting their weighty boots over the slight sill.
Wanbli came last. He glanced sourly down at the out-folded sphincter. “First Father and Mother created doors to slide naturally. These things never have worked…” And then he ran out of gravity.
He thought it was an FTL transition. The Captain had forgotten they were out there and boosted them unprepared. But transitions, however unsettling, were momentary. The gravity changes he had endured on short-haul and shuttle craft had been gradual and never had they lost weight altogether. Wanbli thought his heart might stop.
They were all laughing at him, even the four who were holding the now floating stretcher. If he was falling they were all falling too and no one minded but him. Edward Pierce, composing his white, rubbery face, came back to him. Each of his steps sounded like a gong. “Forgot to warn you. The boundary of the ship field has to be very sharp, or else we’d come home buried in dirt and rubble. It’s always a plunge off the edge.”
“I’m all right now,” said Wanbli, but the tight treble in his voice betrayed him. Greta sputtered.
“You were worse, first time,” said Edward, poking her in the stomach. “You were much worse and you’d been warned.”
“That’s why I’m laughing.” Her reply was somewhat defensive. Again they began walking down the tube.
It was bouncing, Wanbli’s feet decided. The entire tube was bouncing and stretching and would soon split and spill them all into space. He told his feet they could not know they were bouncing, in the middle of all this terror and confusion. He was only grateful he had held his bowel and bladder. He didn’t think the lavatories on the Commitment would be working.
It was not a long walk. They passed a swelling around the wall of the tube—another sphincter door—and then the gray, pitted shell of the Commitment appeared before them. The tube covered a rectangular hatch.
Not a sphincter, thought Wanbli.
“Seal seems intact,” murmured Edward through his suit speaker, with no particular enthusiasm. Perhaps that was the result of poor amplification or perhaps it was only Edward.
“Connection party already reported that,” said Greta.
Wanbli could see the man’s peculiar thin-lipped mouth draw up. “What do they know? Get back now. I’m going to close the door and feed air if it needs it.”
Obediently they all stepped back over the last sphincter. This one closed without difficulty. “It really was a bad idea,” said Wanbli to the person next to him, who turned out to be Greta. She glared in alarm and he added, “The sphincter doors, I mean. Rarely work right.”
“If they were that bad we would not be alive in the Condor.”
Wanbli hadn’t planned to start an argument, standing here in an umbilical cord in black space. As he tried to explain he had only been teasing, the floor began to bounce and shake. Really, this time.
“He is forcing hot air,” said Greta. “To make it habitable.”
“I don’t feel any wind.” Wanbli thought it was just as well. A strong wind in his face, combined with the feeling of falling, might be more than he could take.
“The air moves between the two shells of the tube. It produces…” She sought in her Old Ang vocabulary. “Turbulence.”
As the swaying increased, the revivalists clung to one another for support. Wanbli sank down and squatted over his metal-clad heels. The disturbance went on tor minutes and by the time the tube was quiet, Wanbli had adjusted to the lack of gravity. At least for a while.
Edward popped the sphincter and they all stepped through. The hatch was open and there was light inside.
“It’s old, but it’s mint,” said Edward. Wanbli did not understand the use of the word “mint,” except that it was frosty cold all around. He clanged down into a very large chamber: a slice in the body of the ship. There were handholds all over the walls, both the curved sections and the flat. Great square boxes were bolted to the flat walls, and the curved expanses were broken by panels of controls with little lights and toggles. Machinery had been locked into tracks, neatly in lines like the parking yards of New Benares. That tall thing had to be a crane. Yes, it had a cable running along its treelike neck.
Very primitive, everything.
“God, this ship went out a century before I was born,” said one of the revivalists, who was holding the opposite end of the carrier from that which Greta carried.
“It went out fifty years before I was born,” she replied. “What of it?”
“Just that it must have been one of the first.”
Edward returned to them. He had his helmet under his arm. “Not one of the first; it’s not small enough for that. A civilian effort, of course. But not too long after the first. There might be antique value here. It’s just a matter of finding someone who wants it.
“Here, Red. I want you to come with me.” He took Wanbli’s wrist in his flexible-gloved hand. Wanbli had to notice how similar was the glove to Edward’s own skin. “Don’t touch the walls at all; everything but the air is still damn cold in here.”
Wanbli followed along the curve of a wall, going clank, clank, clank. They passed through another rectangular hatchway into a room which had very different angles from the one they had left. For a moment Wanbli’s innards protested and he almost reached for a deadly-cold handrail, but he controlled himself and then his body decided which wall to call the floor.
Edward watched. “Very good. It hadn’t occurred to me that you hadn’t been weightless before. You seem to have traveled.”
“Travel as long as you like,” answered Wanbli, glad his voice was near normal again, “but they’ll never put you through this on a liner. Only certain truckers ever have to be weightless.”
“Have to be? I like it. The truckers and us too, don’t forget, Red. All the sleepers were trained in null-grav.”
“Well, you’re special,” answered Wanbli, and meant it. He looked around him.
The room was a pie wedge, a quarter-circle, one-fourth the size of the one they had left. It had more light than the freight room behind them, and one entire wall filled with instrumentation. In the center of one wall—the one which seemed most “floor” to Wanbli—rose a black square not much smaller than the dormitory at Tawlin, and on it sat four boxes, dwarfed by their setting, of black plastic and glass. The other walls of the room held many similar boxes. Wanbli did not have to be told what t
hey were. He stepped forward, fascinated, forgetting the frozen walls, forgetting that he was falling.
“There are four slots in the reviver, to handle four coffins at a time,” said Edward, guiding Wanbli’s hand away from an injudicious attempt to touch the black dais. “And four coffins were placed there in the beginning. It was the responsibility of whoever of these four made it through to haul all the rest in and out. No task at all in null-grav.”
Wanbli found the stairs and climbed up to the top. The coffin closest to him had little winking lights. “Have those been blinking like that for all these hundred years?”
“No, they just started when I turned on the heat. Now they’ve got to adjust for that.”
Wanbli stood beside the waist-high coffin. The glass was covered with frost. “That just happened too. Here, I want you to see this.” Edward took his insulated, gloved hand and scraped across the layer of ice. Painted on the glass was a decoration, which Wanbli recognized as part of the map of the six directions. Under it was a stylized seashell in swirly purple and silver. Edward brushed closer to one end, and there under his hand was the face of a man.
He was big-boned, young, with a large nose. Wanbli thought he saw him move, but it might have been the weightlessness playing tricks again. “Is… is the machine waking him up now?”
Edward Pierce snorted and rubbed his nose against the shoulder of his suit. “No. I doubt this prehistoric behemoth ever would resurrect a man. Few of them ever worked when needed, you know.”
Edward gave Wanbli a sharp glance, but Wanbli was still staring down, his mouth open. “You see what I mean, Red? Doesn’t he look like you?”
Now Wanbli’s mouth was open for another reason. “Like me? No! Not at all. Not in the mouth, the chin, the nose, the ears… I can’t see the eyes but I doubt they’re Wacaan garnet. He’s not one little bit like me.”
“Well, he’s red at least. That isn’t a common color.”
Again Wanbli peered down. “I wouldn’t call that red.”
Edward cleared the glass again and gave the sleeper another look. His laugh was staccato. “Far as I’m concerned, you might be brothers.” He left the coffin and walked to another. In the middle of the dais was a spot with no ferrous component, and Edward, striking his boot against it, started to float into the air. Wanbli brought him back.
The second coffin contained a much slighter individual, young, with dark skin. His symbol was the crossbars of Christianity. There had always been Christians on Neunacht, especially among the clans that specialized in medical work, but Wanbli had only become really familiar with the crossbars in Poos City. Many prostitutes were (or became) Christian. It was a tradition.
The third coffin held another russet-colored man: this one with a long, lean-boned face. Under the four directions on the glass he had a very familiar shape. “Eagles!” cried Wanbli. “Not our eagles, but clearly the same thing.”
“Uh-huh. Feathers.” Edward nodded forcefully, as though he’d proved a point. “But this one”—and he knocked against the glass—“is dust already.”
Wanbli glanced down below the glass, to find that the tiny lamps were not lit. “He’s dead?”
Edward sighed. “They’re all dead. This one, however, is beyond revival.” The pale man’s eyes unfocused and his thin eyebrows drew down. He looked beyond Wanbli, beyond the ship, in what might be religious fervor. It occurred to Wanbli that if Edward believed the sleepers to be dead in their present state, then he must believe he himself to be dead. Or to have been dead. Did that explain anything? Were the revivalists clumsy because they had been dead? Plodding because they had been dead?
But Edward did not look dull at all at this moment. His white, rubbery face was intense and his metallic eyes bright.
“Did he die—become unrevivable—when we blew in the air and heat? Was that what did it?”
Edward looked away. “He died when he lay down in the box. This talk of when he became unrevivable doesn’t make any sense.” He went on.
The fourth coffin held a man not much darker than Edward, with a square face. His lights blinked merrily. His sign was a circle with many radii.
“According to Greta, there were a few Pan-ethnic Socialists on this ship.” He straightened. “Notice how all the rest of them”—and the gloved hand swept over the ranks of glass boxes. Wanbli began to count them by rows: ten, twenty, forty…
“… depended on one or more of these four to revive them. If something happened to them, that was it. Later years, each box had its own revival capacity. Or we thought they did.”
And you? Wanbli wanted to ask. What had Edward thought, lying down to die in a box? Had he really thought it death at the time? It didn’t seem the moment to ask.
The others of the party were in the room with them now. They pulled gloves from their belts and began to release the coffins from their moorings. They didn’t bother to scrape clean the glass to look first.
Wanbli, who had not brought the gloves and who was afraid to make a mistake anyway, wandered up and down the aisles and looked at faces. Here was a young man,
slightly overweight and very dark, with the same Christian cross over his chest. A nice, simple religious symbol, thought Wanbli. Compared to some. Next to him was a strapping and beautiful young woman, under the four directions. Another girl was next to her, more delicate but still appealing.
“Eddie,” he said, scuffling loudly down to where Edward supervised the loading of the first coffin: that of the big-boned man on the dais. “All of the first awakeners were male, yet there’s as many women here as men.”
“… no, it’s not perfect, but it’s as close as we’re going to find to the right equipment in this year of Our Lord,” Edward answered a question from one of the four carriers. Pallbearers, thought Wanbli suddenly, and shivered.
Edward turned and heard Wanbli’s words retroactively. “Yes, the supervisors were all men. So?”
“And the women let that happen?”
“Evidently,” Edward pushed him gently away; the first coffin was moving to the door.
“Protectors!” Wanbli moved back, but not too far. It was a strange sight, the man in his glass bier, sharp-nosed in profile, wafted like a flower among six hands. “The women of our clan are brittle as bombs—always thinking they’ve been left out of something. It could never happen that way with us.”
“Things change,” said Edward calmly, “and then they change again. Many times.” The revivalist sighed for the second time, and then he turned on a wrist player and music filled the air. It was a sound that went up and down and in and out, but the melody was fragmented and the whole effect busy and dry. Wanbli’s ears were not trained to it. He was scandalized that Edward would trivialize the moment so.
The loading was fast, for they were practiced and there were two gurneys always in play. Wanbli slid his fur parka sleeve down his wrists to cover his hands and he began to help with the work.
He helped to carry out a young woman with strong bones and a very proud face. Four directions again, this time with the sign of a horse. That image Wanbli recognized, for Myronics had kept a large stable. He wondered if she would prove to be an Old Ang speaker. Or ’Indi, of course. Even if she spoke Doych he’d be able to share a few words with her. After toting two men, one circle and one cross, he picked up another woman, beautiful in the opposite way, all tiny and looking lost in the seven-foot coffin. Crossbars over her.
In the end there were nine coffins left, including the one on the dais printed with eagles. “You’re not going to even try with them?”
“No. Believe me, they’re dust.” Edward’s glance slid away from Wanbli, but then, that was Edward.
“You can go back now, Red. That was a lot of walking, and the job is now Greta’s and her crew.”
Wanbli had trouble hearing him over the music. “You’re staying.”
“I have to. I’m in command.”
Wanbli stuck his chilled hands in his pockets and turned to go, but he stopp
ed again. “That… music you’re playing. Does that make it easier? Sorting the dead from the … I mean the sleepers from the unrevivable.”
The distance was back behind the revivalist’s eyes, as it had been at the tavern that first night. “It makes a long job shorter,” he said. His yellow hairline lifted. “Don’t you enjoy Mozart?”
Wanbli snorted. “I didn’t know it was something that could be enjoyed. Sounds sort of like a headache.”
“We are different,” said Edward, cold and gentle.
EIGHT
WANBLI WANTED to be present for the wakening of the sleepers (as who would not), but he also dreaded it. The revival would also be a disappointment for them and a loss of hope. They had planned to be a handful of humans on a hospitable new planet, and in actuality they would finish their lives as scavengers in a metal house, with no patch of ground to call their own.
This wasn’t too different a fate from that of his own people, who had wanted to be self-sufficient and had found themselves watchdogs on a very short chain. Still, the Wacaan had the sky above their heads.
How ironic: the poor soil-scrabblers alone could see the stars. Wanbli rapped a rhythm against the echoing wall of his quarters.
No one but the truckers lived this way by choice.
He waited to hear that the revival was complete. He wondered which of the passive, unapproachable sleepers would make it, and which were already dead: perhaps these three hundred years. The big-boned man with the shell on his coffin, the splendid-looking woman, the delicate woman. The youngsters with black skin and the crossbars…
He remembered the face of the third man, out there on the black funeral dais, whom they would not even attempt to save. This did not ring right to Wanbli; they should at least try.
The revivalists picked this time to have a general meeting. They were all up at the gym, which was also the assembly room, recreation room and place to store anything outsized they encountered in their scavenging. Wanbli was thus denied the solace of working out. Only two crew members were absent from the meeting: the Captain and one of the astrogators were down in Central, communicating by short scan only. Meetings were not under the Captain’s authority anyway; they were Coordinator Khafiya’s affair.
The Third Eagle Page 19
