Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  “It’s okay.” She lay her head on my chest. “It’s okay. I’m glad I know.” She made no sound but I felt tears. “You think he did it so we could get away? So I could get away?”

  “I—” I remembered something Yuri had said, “I think he loved you more than life. I think he would have done anything for you. Anything he could. This was the best he could come up with.”

  She thought for a while. Finally she said, “People keep doing things for me.”

  “They want to help,” I responded.

  “They all want to keep me alive. Mom—Steel ... You know, she wouldn’t let us call her mom anymore when we got to Earth? We had to call her Steel. Everybody acted so crazy there, on Earth, at Neuschwanstein. So strange.” She rolled away from me and stared at the overhead. “Or maybe everybody acts crazy on Eden. I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. It seems like the more I learn, the more places I go, the more confusing the whole thing is.”

  You’ve got that right, I thought, but what I said was, “I don’t think it gets any easier as you get older.”

  She looked up at me with one of her wonderful lop-sided smiles, so much like Steel’s. “Well, I guess you should know,” she said, digging me in the ribs.

  “Nice!” I answered, “Age jokes! After that back rub I gave you!”

  She laughed and started tickling me. I don’t think I’d been tickled in a thousand years.

  I slept well that night, better than I had in a while. No nightmares.

  My intimacy with Alice had an unexpected effect on me. It threw into contrast the distance that had opened between me and the rest of the crew. It made me angry. Steel had finally sucked me in—into her world of equivocations and secrets. Yuri seemed upset about something but I didn’t feel I could talk with him about it for fear of what I might reveal in return. Who could I tell what? Steel’s maternity was so bizarre in modern terms yet so sacred in ancient ones. Her marriage, her betrayal. The entire effect Archie’s research had had on the little town of Nazareth. How could I talk about any of it? What would I say? Like Steel had said, I had been there in the old, old days. I had experienced families and children but even so the idea that she had been pregnant, that she had delivered Alice and her brother into the world and then—and then taken them away from their father ... I didn’t know how to handle it. It ate at me the whole trip.

  I could see the effect it had on everyone else, as well. There weren’t any more free-ranging bull sessions in the common room when we came off watch, and I don’t think it was just thoughts of my lost talisman that darkened the mood. We were still jazzed coming off the nav net—you couldn’t help but be—but our conversations struggled and died; there were too many places we couldn’t go, things we couldn’t say. We had broken into two camps: Marcus, Yuri, Jemal and Tamika in one, Steel, Archie and me in the other. Alice was the only one of us who seemed to be able to travel freely between the two.

  I finally corralled Archie as we came off the last watch backing down into New Moorea. We had a few days before we docked at Plato Park and I had to talk to someone. I’d been spending most of my off-duty time alone in my cabin.

  Before Eden we might have just stopped for tea in the common room, but now she took me to her quarters. As she closed the hatch behind me she asked, “What’s on your mind?”

  I looked at her face. She looked so tired. Her eyes looked like they were made out of sand. Or salt. “I need to ... I need to talk to somebody ...”

  “That’s why we’re here,” she sat on her bunk, “unless you want to have sex. Or we could do both. Simultaneously or consecutively. You could give me a hand.” I looked at her missing arm and tried to laugh at her joke, but I couldn’t. “What’s up?” she asked.

  “What’s up,” I echoed, rubbing my forehead. “What’s up. I’m having trouble, um, I’m feeling kind of isolated. Feeling kind of isolated ...”

  “From who?”

  I looked up at her. “Haven’t you noticed the change in the crew since we got back? I ... I ...”

  Archie sighed, “I think the stress is starting to take its toll. We’re facing some pretty dangerous times—”

  “It’s not that. It’s—” Then I thought, maybe she was right. The Brainardites. Krupp. Dangerous times. We were looking at the possibility of losing a lot more than a limb. But that wasn’t it. “It’s the secrecy, the, the—” Shiva. Secrecy. I realized I hadn’t even told Archie the truth about John Cheatham’s passing. Had Steel? Who knew what? This was insane. I started over: “This, this ... crew. They aren’t the crew you had the first time you went to Eden?”

  Archie studied me before she responded. “No. Steel put this group together when we decided to go to Brainard’s Planet.”

  “So they don’t—none of them know ... what happened, what you did on Eden?”

  She studied me longer this time. “No,” she said.

  I sighed, “Well, I do know, and it’s tearing me up. I don’t feel like I can talk about it with any of them.”

  “Talk about it? What do you know that you can’t tell them?”

  I looked into her eyes. “Steel, or should I say ‘Estelle,’ told me ... told me about her marriage, her children ...”

  Archie inhaled, looked at the deck, exhaled. “I see.”

  What did I want to ask? “Is—is—Why did you—Is she some kind of amateur anthropologist or something?”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “I mean why? Why did you want Steel with you on Eden? The first time you went. Why was she down there in the first place?”

  “What makes you think I wanted her down there?”

  “Well, it was your project—”

  “She was the money. She wanted to come.” Archie didn’t disguise the anger in her answer, “You think I didn’t know it was a mistake? A risk?” Words poured out of her now. “I had a solid approach, a well thought-out methodology. Drake and I were a team. We were going to infiltrate Eden’s culture posing as a married couple. A. Married. Couple. A stable social unit. Eden’s elaborate sexual taboos would have kept us from having intimate entanglements with any of the natives. We didn’t have children, of course, but that wasn’t unheard of there. We knew we’d be the objects of mild sympathy, nothing more. We had a good chance, a good chance, of living among them for decades. Enough time to really understand them.”

  “So ... so ... What? It was just a, a lark? A whim on Steel’s part? She just—”

  “No, no,” she sighed and rubbed her forehead. “I don’t want to misrepresent her. She was definitely interested in the research. Very interested. Profoundly so.” She shook her head, “That was the problem. Once she got involved there was no keeping her out of it.”

  “What did she want to learn?”

  “What did any of us want to learn? How it worked. What it was like. I don’t know, ask her.”

  I looked at the bulkhead, but what I saw was Alice waving goodbye to her father. “It all seems so pointless.”

  “What?”

  I raised my head to look at her tired eyes. Did I want to tell her? I guess I did: “You know John Cheatham didn’t have a heart attack.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “He shot himself. He shot Louise and then he shot himself.”

  I guess I wanted to shock her, and she was shocked, I could tell, but only for a moment. Then I could see her mind working, processing something. When she finally spoke it was to herself, “Murder-suicide. Classic.” Then to me, “He thought Louise was going to the police?”

  “That’s the way it looks to me.”

  She mulled that over for a while. “Classic,” she said, again more to herself than me, “classic male aggression response.”

  I was stunned. “That –?” I started, “That’s what you think is important? His response?”

  “I’m sorry,” she answered, “I don’t want to seem cold. Of course it was an awful way for Louise to, to die. I know I was angry with her, for her prejudices and her behavior, but
those weren’t really her fault. She certainly didn’t deserve this. She was subjected to incredible pressures from the culture she was in.” She sighed, “Unfortunately, it was precisely this kind of behavior that we went to Eden to study.”

  “What kind of behavior?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  She answered me as though the answer was too obvious to require stating: “The violence inherent in a male dominated society.”

  I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t respond. I just sat there and stared at her, amazed. Dumbfounded. She finally said, “What? What’s the matter?”

  “You,” how could I put this? I didn’t know how to put it. It just came out: “You destroyed John Cheatham’s life.”

  “Mo,” she said, “you just told me that John destroyed Louise’s life. Remember? He shot her. He murdered her. That’s what you said. I didn’t put the gun in his hand. I didn’t tell him to pull the trigger. That was his decision. He made it. And he made it in a classically male fashion.”

  I felt like I was talking to an alien from one of Yuri’s old movies, like Arch was made out of silicon, or, or dark energy or something. “Did you make any decisions?” I asked her, “In a ‘classically’ female fashion or otherwise?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you decide to go to Eden? Did you decide to take Steel with you so you could use her money to fund your research? Did you decide to destroy John Cheatham’s family? To take his children away from him?”

  Archie hung her head in exasperation and exhaustion, “Mo, Mo, listen to the terms you’re using. His children. His family. These are archaic concepts.”

  “They weren’t archaic to him.”

  “Okay,” she nodded, “Okay, that’s fair. But in order for the project to go forward compromises had to be made—”

  “They didn’t have to be made. You chose to make them.”

  She looked at me hard. Then she said, “Do you really think the research we did on Eden wasn’t worth it? You were there. You saw the children, the culture. You think it wasn’t worth the price?”

  I stood up, “You didn’t pay the price! John Cheatham did. He’s dead. At his own hand. Do you understand what has to ... what has to happen to a person to motivate them to do something like that? Steel married him, left him. You took his children.” What could I tell her? What could I say that would get through to her? “When you did that his culture turned on him. He was a pariah. He had no one. You destroyed his life.”

  “Mo, if Steel wanted to leave him she had the right to do it. And even if he hadn’t ... hadn’t committed suicide he only would have lived a few more years. He was going to die anyway—”

  “That’s the point, Archie. He had only a few decades to live. Only a few, precious decades and you destroyed them.”

  “How?”

  I couldn’t believe she didn’t understand this. “He lost his wife, his children, everyone he loved.” Did she understand love? Did she think men didn’t love? How could she be this disconnected? “You made it impossible for him to be a part of his own community. He had no friends, no family, no loved ones, nothing. I know they’re not on the net there but they still have a ... a common, a common sense of ... of each other. You took that away from him. What did he have left? Didn’t you see the man I saw when we were there? Didn’t you see that broken, empty, lonely, lost human being?”

  Did this finally touch her? I didn’t know. She thought a long time before she responded. When she did her posture changed. She was softer, less belligerent than before: “I saw him. I ... I knew time had changed him but ... I ... I know what you’re—I mean I ... I saw him.”

  “Do you really think your actions didn’t have an effect on him? I mean, what do you think he is?”

  “But, Mo, men don’t—I mean, he was—Wait a minute. Wait a minute.” I could see ideas tumbling into each other behind her eyes. “Our actions, of course our actions affected him. But he—he was ... I mean, do you really think he was, he was—?”

  “He was what? In love with Steel? Missing his family? Distraught over saying goodbye to his daughter again? Archie, he’s a human being, like you or me. Or at least he was. And I’ll bet you that if he hadn’t shot Louise we’d all be rotting in a Nazarene jail right now.”

  “Just because we benefited from a criminal act doesn’t mean it wasn’t criminal.”

  “I’m not saying that! But, holy frickin Buddha, you act like he’s some ... some specimen ... some, some sub-human form of life.”

  I saw anger boiling up in Archie, but the anger was checked by doubt. The anger was old, ancient, but the doubt was new. She warred with herself for a moment, but something occurred to her, something she hadn’t thought of before. I could tell it bothered her, scared her, maybe. I took a chance and said one more thing to her, “More importantly, Archie, you act like you had no part in this crime. In a very real sense you did put the gun in his hand. If you and Steel and Drake hadn’t gone to Eden, none of this would have happened. Can’t you see that?”

  She looked at me like a defendant staring down a prosecutor, but her doubt was still there. When she finally spoke it was haltingly, hesitantly, but with the determination of a scientist gnawing at a difficult problem. “The net,” she said, “No one’s on the net there. Maybe ... maybe we didn’t ... Maybe we weren’t able to feel ...” Something crossed her face, opened her features. When she spoke again it was in a quieter voice, but one of discovery, of wonder. “I never felt that John was ... We couldn’t, we couldn’t relate to them the way we ... I mean, I never thought of John the way I think of you or Yuri, Marcus or Jemal. I didn’t think of him the way I thought of Drake. I think of you as people. I thought of John as ... as a, a man, a male, different from me, separate from me ... dangerous to me. The other, the, the enemy, even.” Her face opened in wonder, in horror. In an even quieter voice, she said, “Oh, no. Oh, no. That’s the other behavior we went there to study.”

  “What behavior?”

  Archie put her remaining hand on her head, closed her eyes. “Shiva. Shiva. I missed it. I missed it.”

  “What, Archie?” I sat beside her, “What did you miss?”

  “Assumptions. Assumptions.” She was really beating herself up.

  “What are you talking about? What assumptions?”

  She stood up, “Why we were there! Why we told ourselves we were there.” Her face closed in anguish. There wasn’t room to pace in her cabin, but I could tell she wanted to. “We told ourselves we were going to Eden to help figure out why the war started.”

  “The Pleiadean—I mean, the War of –?”

  “But that wasn’t quite the truth. Oh, Shiva! I missed it!” She pounded the heel of her hand into her forehead. “The truth was we assumed we knew why the war started. We were only going to Eden to confirm our position. We ‘knew’ ... we ‘knew’ ...” She turned to me for solace, for grace.

  “You thought Draco started the war?”

  “We ... we assumed we ‘knew’ ... that the war started because of male aggressiveness. Behavior that was inherently male. But, you see? That’s ... that’s a perfect example of the other behavior we went there to study.”

  “What, sexism?”

  She collapsed into herself. “Yes. Gender bias. But we defined gender bias as male gender bias. We didn’t say it, or even think it, but that’s how we defined it. It was so ingrained in our way of thinking we just ... we just didn’t look for it in women. And I missed it. I missed it in us.” She was rocking now, her hand to her mouth, her eyes blurry with water. “We, we got to Eden and the old ways ... the old ways were everywhere. The mistrust. The fear. Fear of violence, fear of rape ... fear of men. I—I identified with the women. But that’s why I had Drake with me, to, to balance our perspective.” She looked really puzzled, “But he didn’t ... he didn’t seem to—”

  I hung my head and laughed like a condemned man. “Drake was just as willing to blame men for everything as you were. Right?”

  Surprise b
rought Archie’s eyes to mine, “That’s right. He ... How did you—”

  “After all these centuries,” I said, and I felt like every one of them was piled on my back, “All the pain, all the fighting, the posturing and rhetoric and vitriol and, and Jesus, even the war. The freaking war and everything that happened and sexism is still too precious to give up.”

  “Precious? Precious to whom?”

  I stared into the abyss of human folly. “To us. You, Drake, men, women. All of us, every freaking one of us.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Without sexism,” I looked at her with true sadness, “we are forced to face the horror of equality.”

  “Horror? We’ve known for centuries that women and men are equal, millennia—”

  “Have we? Is that what we’ve known? If women are equal to men they’re equal in venality as well as nobility. In stupidity as well as wisdom. In weakness as well as strength. That’s the horror. If women are merely equal to men, there’s no safety anywhere. The world won’t be a better place if women run it; women are just men shaped a little differently. There’s no one to run to, no bosom to hide in. We human beings are all we’ve got. Better to think that women are just ‘kind of’ equal to men. Equal but different, equal but better, more sensitive, less aggressive, just plain nicer.” I simultaneously grieved for our foolishness and wondered at our ability to survive, “So you identified with the women and Drake identified with the women, too, huh?”

  “I ... Maybe ... maybe you’re right. I don’t know. I think he did identify with the women. Or if he didn’t he certainly didn’t, didn’t identify with— I mean, I assumed it was because ... because he knew that men were—Oh, Shiva. You’re right. You’re right. There it is. We assumed ... I brought Drake into the project because he agreed with my assumptions. I wouldn’t have brought him in otherwise. It wasn’t just Drake. I didn’t realize they were assumptions. I thought they were facts because everyone around me thought they were facts.” She collapsed back on the bunk beside me. “I missed it, Mo. I just missed it.”