Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

Were we a cursed ship now? To look at the faces of the crew one might have thought so. Our experience of the universe was too vast for us to really be superstitious, but still, I knew how they felt. Not just any talisman—my first talisman.

  Tamika asked me, “What ... what was it? What did you—”

  “It was just a little, a little ...” I felt funny naming it, but there was no reason they shouldn’t know. “It was a little piece of meteorite I found on ... found back when I was a ... on Mars. When I was ...”

  “Your first life?” Jemal asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, “Listen, it’s—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to ... I mean it’s just a ... just a little piece of ... I didn’t mean to make everybody ...”

  Yuri caught my eye. He cocked his head to one side and tried to smile, but I could tell it was forced. The joviality in his voice was forced, too. “Hey, it’s a rock. There are lots of rocks. We’ll get you another one.”

  “Yeah,” I nodded, “Yeah.”

  “Mo, I’m so very sorry.” Steel’s rich voice poured out like scented oil and I was amazed at how, even now, even after all that had happened, it could warm me, soothe me, flow over me and into me. I looked in her eyes and saw a sea of tears trembling there, threatening to spill over. “I owe you so much, and now this. I can’t—I don’t know how—I’m so very, very sorry.”

  I looked at the floor, at my feet, anywhere but into her eyes. “Yeah, well, let’s—It’s okay. I’m okay. Let’s just—” I sat back down. “So you can’t tell me anything about Krupp. Okay. Maybe I already know everything I need to know about him. What’s next on the agenda?”

  The exigency of the present overcame the injuries of the past. We all took a collective breath and tried to move on. Steel looked at the table, at her hands, maybe, or maybe her sins and said, “Well ... well. Krupp wants to know where we’re going. So do I.” She turned to Yuri. “What have you come up with, Yuri?” she asked, “Where are we going?”

  Yuri looked up from a doodle he’d been pulling out of a water ring on the table. “What? Oh, where are we going. Right.” He seemed to put thoughts of lost talismans aside and turn to thoughts that didn’t feel any more pleasant to him. “Well, um, I’ve been thinking about the problem. You know, the, uh, the behavioral problem with the Brainardites ... the Brainardites ...” Yuri was definitely darker somehow, not his normal fatalistic self, and his reference to ‘Brainardites’ seemed kind of formal. We’d been referring to them as ‘the slugs.’

  “Yes?” Steel prompted.

  Yuri looked back at his doodle. “Yeah, it’s ... it’s not so much an engineering problem as it is a, you know, question of policy. Of procedure.”

  “Procedure?” Steel queried.

  “Well, yeah. More like, I guess, what they used to call ‘rules of engagement.’ ”

  “I don’t follow.”

  Marcus said, “It’s an old military term.”

  “Military ... law enforcement ...” Yuri offered.

  “We know what the phrase means,” interjected Archie, “How does it apply?”

  Yuri glanced at Archie, then exchanged looks with Marcus, Tamika, Jemal. He spoke, “Well, I was thinking that you could call the incident with Drake their first interaction with us. Sort of.”

  Steel looked around at the rest of the crew, looked for attitudes, thoughts, opinions. Tamika said, “Maybe they have noticed us.”

  Archie said, “How? How would they have noticed us? We haven’t found any sensory organs—”

  “Heat, vibration, I don’t know,” Yuri interrupted, “maybe the stuff that causes the plague lets them know that something new has entered their environment—”

  “But why now?” Steel asked, “Why would they wait so long—”

  “I don’t know,” Yuri answered, “I don’t know. It’s just ... It’s just ... what if it was a response to us? A, a directed action? Rational? Pre-meditated?”

  Jemal said, “What if they don’t want us to be there?”

  Steel studied them all for a long time. But it was Archie who spoke, “I’m sorry. I just can’t accept that. You’re conjuring up an animosity that we have no evidence for.”

  Marcus started to respond but Steel held up her hand to silence him. She said, “I know that in Drake we lost a colleague, a friend. It was a tremendous shock to all of us. But to extrapolate from that one event—”

  Archie interrupted, “Brainard made five sorties to the surface. We made over twenty. None of the slugs so much as changed direction. Draco and the Pleiades have observed them for half a millennium from orbit. They’ve seen nothing that could be interpreted as conflict. No violence, no predation, no—”

  “No rapid motion of any kind,” Yuri broke in, “I know. Until our last visit to the surface.”

  Archie and Steel contemplated that for a moment, then Arch said, “But ... but what’s their motivation? Why would they be mad at us? We haven’t, we haven’t done anything to them—”

  “Sorry,” Yuri said, “I didn’t mean to say that they’re mad at us. I have no idea how they feel about us or if they feel about us. But suppose ... suppose they’re starting to notice us, to respond to us. Maybe they’re mad at us, maybe they love us and the slug thought it was shaking hands with Drake. I don’t see that it makes any difference. The point is that their behavior has become dangerous to us. We can’t communicate with them. If they start to do something that will compromise the E-suits we can’t ask them to stop.”

  Archie asked, “You want us to learn their language? How? We’ve been trying to do that for five hundred years.”

  Yuri didn’t respond. He just kept dragging his finger through the ring of water on the table, stretching it into a reclining eight: the symbol for infinity.

  As Steel observed this she softened. Her countenance changed to one of concern, almost compassion. “What is it, Yuri,” she asked. “What are you thinking?”

  He continued to trace his finger around the symbol, his eyes focused on something very far away and very sad. Marcus eventually spoke for him: “We’ve been discussing this regularly while you were on Eden, Captain. Trying to come up with some way to deal with this. Manufacturing environmental suits that are somehow infinitely durable or impenetrable is simply not possible. To make them even incrementally tougher than they already are sacrifices mobility, dexterity. Never mind knee joints or hip joints, how do you design gauntlets that could withstand unpredictable amounts of force? We’d end up in hardened barrels with walls a foot thick. We couldn’t move.”

  “Robots?” Steel asked.

  Yuri spoke, “Same problem we had last time. We can’t send robotic machines down to the surface. Anything quick enough, agile enough, adaptive enough to handle the environment down there, the tasks we have in mind, would have to be organic. It would have to have at least a rudimentary Farrellian brain. It would have to be conscious of itself. And we’d have to shield it as thoroughly as we would ourselves or the plague would simply destroy it.”

  “But, Yuri,” Steel responded in her gentlest voice, “we have to go back there. Our work isn’t finished—”

  “I know, I know,” Yuri said. “I have an idea that might—I mean, I know a guy who ...” Yuri thought for a moment, “There’s this place. It’s a kind of sculpture garden—”

  “A sculpture garden?” Archie asked.

  Tamika replied, “Have you heard of Plato Park?”

  “In the outer arm,” Jemal added.

  “The far outer arm,” Yuri amended. “New Moorea.”

  “I don’t think I have,” said Steel.

  “Well,” Yuri responded, “New Moorea has five small moons, tiny. They’re all clustered together. They probably started out as a single moon that was torn apart by tidal forces. The largest is only fifteen or twenty klicks across. This guy I know noticed that the smallest was kind of tetrahedral, you know, like a pyramid? Another was vaguely cubical. The other three were more spherical, but it gave him an idea that he’s been working on for the last
century or so.”

  “What?” Steel asked.

  “Well, he’s into the history of mathematics and philosophy and stuff and he thought it would be fun, or funny, or ironic or something if he carved them into the five Platonic solids. You know, tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron ... what’s the other one?”

  Marcus answered, “Icosahedron.”

  “Right,” Yuri went on, “anyway, you know, ideal shapes floating in space and all that. That’s the joke. Just another one of those ideas that started as a bar bet.”

  “Okay, Yuri,” Steel said. “Once again I’m way behind you. What does this have to do with our mission?”

  “Well ...” He didn’t go on. Marcus stepped in:

  “Yuri told us that this person ... What was his name?”

  “Eddie,” Yuri answered.

  “Yes,” Marcus went on, “He’s developed a very powerful, compact tool for doing the sculpting: a high-powered laser, but small, portable.” Marcus checked out Yuri’s attitude; Yuri was staring at the table. “Yuri thinks we could use these lasers as defensive ... um, defensive ...” Marcus cleared his throat, “defensive weapons.”

  “Weapons?” Archie asked. “ ‘Weapons’? We don’t want to fight them—”

  “Of course not,” Yuri responded. “I was just thinking that ... that if we had had something like this when Drake went down we could have ... we could have cut through the slug’s pseudopod before ... before his suit was holed.”

  No one spoke for a time as Steel and Archie digested this idea. I understood why. ‘Weapon’ was another concept that had just faded away after the war. We didn’t have weapons anymore. Why would we? What would we do with them? I had just been reminded of what people did with weapons.

  Yuri went on, “The cutting rate and accuracy of these things are very high. Better than any construction tools I know of.” His gaze went back to his doodle on the table. When he spoke again it was in a quieter voice, “I thought about modifying ... modifying surgical ... you know, surgical ...” He stopped.

  “Yuri, are you all right?” Steel asked. He was looking a little pale.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m fine.” He looked around the table, “If anyone can come up with a better idea, I’m open. This is the best I’ve got.”

  Chapter 28

  Alice continued to be a little distant from everyone—not surprising after what she’d been through—but still, I was glad when she came up to me after the third boost watch and asked if I wanted to have some sex. She did it in a very fortieth century way. As we left the control room I noticed she was walking a little stiffly. She stretched a little and said, “My back is killing me. Hey, Mo, you want to have some sex?”

  I answered, “Sure. How about I give you a massage first?”

  She said, “Sounds great,” and we headed for her cabin.

  As we walked down the corridor I couldn’t help but think how different she would have been if she’d never left Eden. If we’d both been Edenites, she never would have asked me and if she had I would have said something like, ‘Get out of here! I’m old enough to be your father.’ Which wasn’t true. My having sex with Alice was more like Eleanor of Aquitaine having sex with me—I mean, you know, if Eleanor had taken better care of herself. But following her around the curving hallway on Steel’s personal starship boosting for the edge of the galaxy it didn’t seem racy or ribald; it just seemed, I don’t know, reasonable.

  As we entered her room she stripped down and jumped on her bunk, lying face down. I sat beside her and started to rub her back.

  After a little while I asked, “How’re you holding up?”

  My thumbs tracing up each side of her spine expelled the air from her lungs. She answered, “Okay.”

  “Yeah?” I pulled down the sides of her ribcage. “You’ve had quite a ride.”

  “I suppose. It’s the only one I’ve ever been on.” Laying my palms on her glutes, my thumbs on her sacrum, I ploughed a little pile of skin and fat toward her shoulders. She sighed, “I really thought he’d be gone when we got there. You know? After it took so long to get back from Brainard’s Planet I ... I thought we’d be too late. I never thought I’d get to see him again.”

  I walked my fingertips up her traps from her shoulders to the base of her skull. “Yeah, I’m glad you did.” Splaying my fingers, I raked down from her shoulders, across her glutes, down the back of her thighs and calves, over her heels and the bottoms of her feet, finally grabbing her toes and pulling, lengthening her. “It must have been tough, though. Emotionally, I mean.”

  She thought for a moment. Then, “It was just so sad. He’d never been anywhere, never seen anyplace but Nazareth. Except for that one camping trip we took when I was little, out to the coast to see the forest—he just, he just lived in his little town. You remember when he wanted to go up and look at the stars? To see where I’d been?”

  “I remember.” I pushed back up to her neck and into her hair, kneading her scalp.

  “That was just so sad.”

  I worked on her a little longer, until she seemed ready to move on to other things. She flipped over on her back and said, “Hey, you want to log on while we do it?”

  “Sure,” I smiled. Melding telepathically while you’re melding physically can be very intense, but it produces an incredible sense of intimacy, of closeness, maybe safety more than anything else. It can be really hilarious—you can’t control what you’re thinking while you’re in the throes of passion and some of it can be downright funny, particularly in light of what your partner is thinking. But it’s also very erotic. We logged on and got comfortable:

  The first thing ... the first thing is the infinite mirror of her eyes: reflection upon reflection, thought upon thought. I see her eyes being gazed into by mine being gazed into by hers being gazed into by mine ... her beautiful eyes, almond shaped like Steel’s, Steel’s eyes that she gave to John Cheatham that John and Steel gave to Alice. That they gave to Alice’s brother. I see Jacob Cheatham’s face laughing on a ski slope in Gstaad: Alice’s brother, her older brother, lost—no. Happier times. Happier times. Bavaria. Motes dancing in shafts of sunlight that bounce off columns of porphyry in a golden hall. Living in a castle! The tallest spire reminds her of an erect penis. We laugh. We caress and feel the skin of the other feeling our skin. And time passing and all the time in the world and not enough time and no time at all as I enter her and feel her being entered as I feel her experience my experience of entering. And she is so young, so new, as I was, as my wife was as I first entered her as I gave my eyes to her, my heart and all that I was and the love that transcended and could not end, would not end, didn’t have to end, but—no. No. Happier times. Alice’s first time. Her first time with the servant on the Marienbrucke behind the castle with the falls thundering underneath. The Marienbrucke where Krupp had ripped my past away and Steel had ripped Alice’s past away and I lost my youth and she lost her youth, her childhood defined by endless desert and my childhood defined by endless desert, only her sky was blue and mine was pale salmon. But time, time was passing and the end was waiting, looming. The party in Katmandu and lights and dancing and Yuri, Yuri who made her laugh who made me laugh and we laughed at Yuri or with him or of him and FREEWHEELING! to Circe and seeing Aunt Archie and Uncle Drake again—only they weren’t aunt and uncle on Circe, only on Eden.

  This went on for some time. We roamed and frolicked within each other and enjoyed each other and discovered each other. Who knows what all we thought. Passionate minds are kaleidoscopic. After a while we were sweaty and panting and lying side by side.

  In time Alice spoke. What she said made me sad and made me smile. Her voice was creamy and relaxed: post-coital. What she said was, “You’re wife was very pretty. I don’t think any woman can be as pretty as she looks to a man who loves her.”

  “I don’t know ...” Exposure is always a tricky thing for me. I never know if what people are seeing is what is actually there.

  “I like looki
ng at me through your eyes,” she continued. “I’m not as pretty as your wife, but I’m a lot prettier than I think I am.”

  Like Matessa in Kindu who was leaving life, I didn’t want to deny Alice anything, just in case she was leaving, too. “My wife wasn’t pretty,” I said, “she was beautiful.” I looked into her eyes, just her eyes, now. “You’re beautiful, too.”

  She dropped her gaze to my chest. “Hmm,” she said, “‘beautiful’ seems like such a big word for a face.”

  “I’m not talking about her face. And I’m not talking about yours.”

  “Oh.” And we lay in each other’s arms for a while. Then, “So ... Mom told you—I mean Steel told you—anyway, you know that I’m— that Steel is ...”

  “Oh,” and I remembered remembering, “you picked up on that?” Like I said, you can’t control what you think in the throes of passion. “Yeah, we had quite a conversation.”

  Alice ran her fingers through the hair on my chest—hair that had been scales when she first met me. “She can be pretty difficult at times. I’m not really sure what her relationship to the truth is.”

  This brought a completely unedited response from my diaphragm; I think it was a laugh, or something like one. Alice laughed a little, too. But then I said, “It was startling seeing Steel through your eyes, I mean, back when you were little. I thought I was looking at you, at first, but then I realized I couldn’t be.” Which brought up heredity, which reminded me of something but not something I could ask Alice. “I wonder how often she changes her appearance.”

  “Probably too often.”

  “And seeing John, I mean, your dad ... when he was younger.” I looked down at her. “You really loved him, didn’t you?”

  “He was my dad.” She said it simply. I thought of my father and knew what she meant. She seemed to ponder something for a while. I waited. Then, very quietly, she said, “He shot himself, huh? And Aunt Louise?”

  My heart sank, “Oh, no.” Why had I agreed to go online with her? Damn it. DAMN it! Can’t I do anything right? “I’m so sorry, Alice. I shouldn’t have—I didn’t want you to—”