“Are you trying to put me off?”
“Oh, no,” Gellen said, bobbing above the tow line, only to get a closer look at her mauve quills and tangerine skin tone. “It simply isn’t possible to register a complaint until we get to the Kaluza Alcube station.”
“Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m not about to let some mope deprive me of my rights,” Ms. Vidian said with a tone of smug indignation.
“We respect your rights, but radio waves are traveling much more slowly than we are and there’s nothing we can do about that. Don’t worry, though, everything we’re saying is being recorded.”
“Without my permission?”
“We have your permission.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You signed a legally binding agreement.” Gellen glanced down at the net. “Would you care for blueberry, chocolate, pistachio . . . or maybe casaba melon?”
“What’s your name?” Reina Vidian demanded in a threatening tone.
“Melotas.”
“Your superiors will hear about this, Mr. Melotas Mope,” she threatened, snatching a drink from the net.
“I’m sure they will.”
The lid slammed shut. Gellen sighed, went back to the galley, put away the remaining drinks, and popped his head into the cockpit again. Jano Mur’s frustration filled its cramped confines like a thick vapor.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“It doesn’t look good,” Jano said, glancing at him before turning her lean body back to the displays.
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
“How are the passengers?”
“They’re okay.”
“And how are you doing?”
“Holding together,” Gellen said. “And you?”
“Thanks for asking. I’ve never gone through anything quite like this before.”
“Who has?”
“Nobody living.”
Gellen didn’t reply to that.
“The Serapis’s autonomic response system kicked in as soon as the problem was detected, but not quickly enough to get us refocused on the lensline,” Jano said. “I’ve just been floating up here trying to figure out a solution from the quantum data.”
Gellen shrugged. “What else can you can do?”
“Something, but I don’t know what it is yet. Have you got any suggestions?” she asked. “Anything at all?”
“I wish I did.”
Jano hadn’t expected him to provide an answer and he couldn’t offer her false hope. That was for passengers, not the tach.
“I’m sorry, Gellen,” Jano said.
“About what?”
“About failing you and the passengers.”
“You didn’t fail us.”
“I’m the tach.”
“I know, but we’re not lost yet.”
“We’re probably going to be.”
She was offering her considered professional analysis. They were straying farther from the gravitational lensline all the time and they both knew there was no way back. Gellen felt the terrible weight of her regret.
“Well,” he said after a few heartbeats, “I was going to retire soon anyway.”
“I wasn’t.” Jano Mur smiled for the first time since she’d informed Gellen of their dilemma, but it was a rueful smile.
“It’s been nice working with you,” Gellen said. In the thirty-seven times they’d crewed together on the Serapis they’d never exchanged a cross word. He liked Jano very much.
“Same here, Gellen,” she said softly. “So, what do you think will happen now?”
“No one knows.”
“I realize that, but what do you think will happen?”
“I think . . .” What did he know about death, apart from its physical properties? “I think we’ll cease to exist.”
“And then?”
“And then nothing.”
“Or maybe everything?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.” Gellen tended to shy away from philosophical discussions outside books.
“Neither do I,” Jano said. “I better get back to work.”
“Yes,” Gellen said, “and I better go below and check on the passengers.”
“Right.”
Gellen left her and rejoined the travelers while they drank and wallowed in oneiric entertainments long out of date back home.
Dyra Nagon, a pretty young woman with pale green plumage transplants, radiated maternal love as she lay in her open berth watching her child drift within arm’s reach. The two emitted a pleasant, powdery smell.
“Your baby seems content,” Gellen said.
“I changed him and he’s had plenty of milk, so I don’t think he’ll be too noisy.”
“Weightlessness doesn’t bother him?”
“It did at first, but after he got used to it he fell asleep pretty fast. He just woke up a few minutes ago.”
“Sleeping’s a good way to pass the time.”
Gellen didn’t want to think about the baby having no future. He moved on to the next passenger.
“I never knew lenslining would be so pleasant,” a small, balding man said as he selected a drink.
“Thank you, sir,” Gellen said, admiring the pattern of cosmetic ridges on the passenger’s scalp, sort of a Mayan design. “We try to make the trip as nice as we can.”
“My name’s Poole Laclan,” the passenger said, pushing himself part way out of his berth and sticking out his free hand.
Gellen shook with him, taking in a whiff of the compact man’s easy self-confidence. Poole smiled and squeezed sweet fluid into his mouth through the packet’s sucking tube. After chatting for a moment, Gellen moved on to the next cognizant passenger, and then to the next. It was a relief to see that Ms. Vidian’s lid was still closed.
He went back to the galley to fetch some snacks. His charges had no idea they were on their way to Limbo, but the journey was still trying enough that they could use the distraction of a little food.
Jano’s question intrigued Gellen. What was going to happen? Maybe they would expand beyond infinite mass, squeezing through all spacetime dimensions. Maybe they would spread over the multiverse’s entirety, vibrating on superstrings forever. Or maybe they would just die.
The passengers would be scared when they learned the truth. After the initial shock some would cast blame—starting with Ms. Vidian, unless he missed his guess—but ultimately they’d resign themselves, weaken, and waste away as they ran out of food and water. That was the most likely outcome, but not the only possibility. Anything could happen.
No matter what, at some point everyone would have to be told. Gellen wasn’t sure if it would be Jano’s duty to tell them or his. Either way, they’d all end up as just so many trillion tachyons hurtling toward nowhere.
Gellen hadn’t looked forward with much enthusiasm to life after lenslining, except that it would leave him more time for reading. Now that retirement was unattainable, it seemed like a wonderful idea. There were so many books he hadn’t read, so much time wasted.
Ms. Vidian’s hostile voice pulled him back from his grim reverie. “I was told I’d be provided my special dietary needs.”
“If there’s been a nutritional oversight,” Gellen said, “please come with me to the med booth and your metabolism will be evaluated, so the foods we have can be converted for your needs.”
“What?” she demanded from underneath her berth’s open lid.
He repeated what he’d just said, a standard spiel he’d repeated hundreds of times.
“How dare you?” The second syllable rose sharply in tone.
“How dare I what, Ms. Vidian?”
“How dare you treat me like this?” she cried with such inimical passion that Gellen felt her secret tears burning behind her eyelids. “I paid a lot for this trip.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” She flung herself out of her cylinder and
glowered down at him in all her orange and purple-quilled fury.
Lids jerked open all around them, so that the conscious travelers could get an earful to break up the monotony. Gellen fancied that even the immersed dreamers stirred as Ms. Vidian reached her considerable decibel peak.
“Is this how you treat your customers?” she screamed, reeking of bile and desperation. “I gave up everything to go to Kaluza! I’ve worked hard all my life, never thinking of myself, always doing what was best for my daughter! You and your med booth! No mope is going to talk down to me!”
“I’m not talking down to you,” Gellen said. “I’m stating our policy, which observes the law in letter and spirit.”
“Oh, you’ve got all the answers, haven’t you?”
“I’m just following procedure.”
“Well, I’ve got a procedure for you,” she warned. “You won’t be working here much longer.”
“Yes,” Gellen said, wondering where “here” was. “I’m aware of that.”
That shut up Ms. Vidian for a moment. As she eyed him with puzzlement, he silently chastised himself for letting it slip.
“I’m retiring,” he added.
“Then I’ll see that you get no pension!”
“Pension?”
“Yes, your pension,” she said triumphantly. “I know a lot of important people. My daughter’s a housing authority executive on Kaluza. She’s got contacts! We’ll take care of you!”
Gellen wasn’t really listening to her anymore, though he kept gazing at her, navigating her torrential rage on a skiff fashioned from his own quicksilver thoughts.
He considered what little he knew about negative energy conduits. There were hundreds of them along the gravitational lensline, drawing vast power from quasars through superstring vibrations interfacing branes. A quaver had unfocused the lensliner’s path. Bad luck, but it was a precarious system at best. And yet, for the equivalent of six decades Gellen had been doing his job without major mishap. Only now did he fully comprehend what a monumental achievement it was to move from one Alcube to another.
It had been a good life and he didn’t want to go out on a querulous note. He was impelled to reach Reina Vidian because she was in need, even if she didn’t realize it herself. He waited for her self-righteous tirade to reach a crescendo. At last she paused for breath and Gellen seized his opportunity.
“Ms. Vidian,” he said, “may I call you Reina?”
“You may not.”
“But isn’t that your name?”
“Don’t patronize me!”
“That wasn’t my intention,” Gellen said. “I’d simply like to address you as one human being to another.”
“Oh, isn’t Mr. Mope charming?” she said, smirking as she looked around at the other passengers, her ire perversely energized by Gellen’s request. “He wants to be friends.”
“Well, why not?” Ossian asked.
“What?”
“Why not be friendly? He’s just trying to help.”
“Who asked you?” she shot back.
“You did,” said Dyra Nagon said. “You asked if we thought this man is charming.”
“I think he is,” Ossian said.
Somebody snickered.
Reina Vidian’s jaw clenched.
“It must have been a rhetorical question,” Poole said.
Dyra put her hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle. Somebody else snorted. And then nearly everybody was laughing. The dreamers, the baby, and Gellen were the only ones who didn’t join in the derision. Nevertheless, Ms. Vidian wasn’t about to give in. She relished the fight, her eyes narrowing as she rounded on first one perceived enemy and then another.
“Who do you think you are, talking to me like that?” she screamed at the grinning Poole Laclan.
“You silly little twit!” she shouted at Dyra Nagon.
“And you!” She turned her ire toward Ossian. “You’re not a woman or a man! How could you know what it means to be a widow, to sacrifice for your child? You have no idea what it’s like to give so much, to leave everything behind!”
Before she could elaborate, something stopped her cold.
Gellen felt it too, a queasy dissociation. It was as if the pocket of air he was floating in separated from everything else, while other pockets inflated all around him, abruptly doubling, tripling, quadrupling, quintupling. One grew from another in an expanding froth so rapid and profuse that it could barely be taken in with the human eye. From inside each of these countless spheres the traveler’s faces, including Gellen’s own, peered out as if from distorted mirrors.
It lasted only a moment and then everything was just as it had been before.
Gellen would have thought it was a hallucination if he hadn’t felt Reina Vidian’s hatred dwindle and her hidden fear burgeon to replace it. She gaped, revealing teeth and gums. “What was that?”
“Just a trick of the light,” Gellen rasped through a dry throat. “Nothing to worry about.”
Her lower lip trembled.
“It’s all right,” Gellen said, sponging up her misery. The cabin was silent now, except for her sobs.
Reina Vidian had retreated at last from the battle she waged with herself, curling up and drifting away. Gellen knew from experience that if he didn’t act she’d soon be past his ability to comfort her. He touched her fingers before she was out of reach.
She turned her wet face toward him. For a moment Gellen thought she would pull away. But she didn’t. She clutched his hand and let her anguish pour into him. She was so desolate that it hurt him. But he could take it; he’d penetrated much denser armor in his time. He withstood the emotional onslaught until Reina’s first wave of relief washed through him. Looking into her reddened eyes, he saw silent gratitude. Her hot, damp grip relaxed. She was still frightened, but she would be all right.
Now he must honor her need for privacy. He was exhausted from bringing her back, but such was the true purpose of his profession, not just serving food and drinks. Never had a mope been more needed. He gently let go of Reina’s hand and turned toward the galley.
“What’s going on?” Dyra Nagon asked as Gellen pulled himself past her berth on the tow line. She held her baby close and her scalp feathers spread out around her heart-shaped face.
“Nothing,” he lied. “Everything’s fine.”
The baby started to cry. Dyra quickly opened her sheath to breast-feed him.
“Can I get anything for you?” Gellen asked, looking around the cabin.
“Just the truth,” Ossian said.
Gellen pulled himself around to face Ossian’s searching eyes. Everyone was staring at the mope. They wanted him to help them, but not in the way he’d helped Reina Vidian. They just wanted him to tell the truth. Didn’t these poor, doomed travelers deserve that much? He almost blurted it out, but then he remembered there was still a chance, no matter how remote, that their course might be corrected.
Each passing second made that less likely, but what was a second out here in M-space? It could have been an hour . . . a day . . . a week . . . a month . . . a billion years.
Gellen didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. He swallowed the travelers’ fears and returned to the galley, wanting strong drink for a chaser. He heard the baby’s wailing and Dyra soothing him, in counterpoint to Reina Vidian’s whimpering. He felt no physical sensation except the beating of his own heart. Barely aware of what he was doing, he pulled a packet out of the stasis bank—not the harmless stuff he served to passengers, but his private stock—before he thought better of drinking it.
It wouldn’t help. Oblivion was coming and he might as well face it with all his faculties. Who knew what he might learn before it was over? Would he go on through eternity, flattening and expanding at millions of times light speed? Or would he stop breathing at some point, his heart no longer beating, his blood no longer circulating?
He reminded himself that he had already lived for millennia compared to those who’d never left home, e
ven if there was no difference in subjective time. He’d needed few restorative treatments and was still functioning pretty well at eighty-one. He’d seen hundreds of worlds and moons. He’d had quite a life.
But these rationalizations failed to buck him up. Gellen let go of the drink and watched it float at eye level, a gleaming ruby blob with a sucking tube attached.
As happy as he’d been on his first lensliner, the Olympia, he was eager to get home. He’d hoped that things might have advanced to the point where someone like him would be socially accepted. All the way back, he thought about how delighted his mother had been that he’d found a career.
She wasn’t there, of course. He was only a couple of days older, but she was long dead. He’d expected that, but he still hadn’t been ready for it emotionally. What was even worse was that he soon discovered society’s changes were more than he’d bargained for, while human nature remained the same. Gellen was as much of an outcast as ever, even more so because of the unfamiliarity of his surroundings. One of his favorite novelists, L.P. Hartley, had written that the past was a foreign country. What would Hartley have made of a future that was changed radically every time he came home?
Gellen had found comfort in a few affairs—men, women, gynes—but nothing permanent. How could a relationship last if he would never see his lover again? He always stuck pretty close to the Alcube stations between trips. Life on the ground was too much. Naked emotions oozed through flimsy walls and pressed in on him while he lay awake at night. He couldn’t bear living among the pulsing, neurotic masses, but he could always deal with a few frightened souls in a liner cabin . . . at least up to now.
His hands were trembling and sweat stung his eyes. He was coming apart, absorbing the passengers’ anxieties while trying to curb his own fear. It was more than he could bear, for the first time in all his lenslining years.
Gellen yanked himself toward the cockpit to see if Jano needed him. He was on the verge of hysteria, but he managed to tamp it down for her sake. As he stuck his head into the cockpit he abruptly felt a powerful emanation he didn’t expect—elation. Now he was even more worried. It was not like Jano to delude herself.
OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology Page 49
