Time seemed slow, and yet without her really noticing, the changing room had become emptier. Wahram was looking at her; his look said they didn’t have to do the captain thing and be the last ones off. She read this, laughed, grabbed his hand.
“Shall we join the next group?”
He nodded gratefully. There were going to be only a few more groups departing from this room. He was ready.
She pulled him into the lock. The twenty people inside looked at the outer doors. It was like being in an industrial-sized elevator. Some embraced. Hand found hand, until the group was a joined circle. She squeezed Wahram’s hand hard.
The air hissed out of the room. They braced themselves. The outer doors pulled back in both directions into the hull; black space yawned before them, the stars like spilled salt. Only a faceplate between you and the stars. There were so many stars that the patterns as seen on Earth were overwhelmed; it was simply space itself, star-blasted, nameless and huge—more than the human mind was meant to confront. Or simply the night sky, a primal experience, half of life. Part of themselves. Time to sleep, perchance to dream. They gathered their strength and out they went with a Shackleton leap.
They floated in the black, and some puffed out a bit of propellant, so that they pinwheeled away from their rapidly receding ship. It was very quickly a distant white chip, lit within its whiteness by a string of diamonds firecracking in its stern. Look away, don’t burn your retinas; glance back; the ETH Mobile was maybe one of the stars there. They were on their own.
There was no sign of the other groups. Suddenly the idea that they could be found and rescued seemed impossible, a dream or hope that could not come true. They had jumped to their deaths.
But she had been out here before; she knew it could be done. Their suit transponders meant they were each beaconing like a fierce little lighthouse.
They established a group comms band on the helmet radios at 555, but as time wore on, few people spoke. There was little to say. Swan wanted to let go of the hand that was not Wahram’s, but didn’t. She clutched his right hand with her left; she held it tight. He squeezed back. She switched to band 345, heard only the sound of his breathing, steady and slow. He looked at her as he heard her too, breathing in his ear. His face was round behind his faceplate, his expression grave but fearless.
“When you do you think it will happen?” Swan said, looking at the white dot she thought was the ETH Mobile.
“Soon, I should think,” he replied.
And almost as he said it there was a flash of light in the area where Swan had been looking. “That was it!”
“Maybe so.”
After that a long time passed. An hour… two hours… then three.
Then Wahram said, “Look; here comes our rescue ship.”
Swan twisted to get a look over her shoulder, and saw a little space yacht approaching them at an angle, slowly.
“Well,” she said. “Good.”
And Venus was still shaded; it seemed the shield must have been saved. And they were rescued.
But then the little space yacht exploded right next to them. Swan, blinded by this flash, had just registered what it was, and almost as quickly concluded that some shrapnel from the collision of the ETH Mobile and the pebble mob must have flown their way and hit the yacht—bad luck, it seemed to her as their little ring of twenty was pulled apart by something, probably gas or debris from the yacht, meaning people were probably hurt—anyway in the same second as the explosion she found herself yanked free of both Wahram and the person on the other side of her. Crying out at the realization, she tucked and somersaulted to keep Wahram in her view—saw him pinwheeling with arms and legs extended, a spray of red crystal shooting out of one of his legs. “Pauline clear my faceplate,” she said, and fingered the jet controls in her gloves, stabilizing herself relative to Wahram and then jetting off at full power after him. Briefly she passed through a little field of detritus from the wrecked yacht, there was a big spinning fragment of it even, perhaps a quarter or a third of it, sheared open so that rooms and bulkheads were revealed, as in a cutaway drawing or a doll’s house. She had to change course to zip by the stern of it, then steer her suit for all it was worth to get back on Wahram’s track. He was still spinning, and much smaller already; she hit her suit’s maximum burn, aimed herself toward him. It was almost a task for Pauline, but there was flotsam and jetsam to be dodged, so she kept the controls and chased him while dodging these fragments of the yacht. Clear of them, she accelerated yet again, flying hard, bringing to bear everything she had ever done as a flier, heedless of anything but the chase. Wahram grew bigger. Now she cried out, “Pauline, help!”
“Let me fly the suit.”
“All right but go! Go!”
“You’re at full burn already. I have to slow down if you want to rendezvous with him.”
“Do it!”
They shot through the stars. Wahram grew bigger still. Swan took over the controls again, over Pauline’s objection, and kept closing on him as fast as possible, until the last second, when she flung herself around and flared the jets of the suit, almost running into him; she had to dodge him with a thrust, pass by him with centimeters to spare, see in a passing flash his unconscious face, mouth open; she cried out as she jetted hard and hard again, swinging the suit around in a tight curve and coming back to him. Pauline couldn’t have done it any better.
His suit had been punctured below the left knee; there was frozen blood like a crust of coagulation, a giant scab. She grabbed him there and held the little tear shut.
“Give me a hose, let’s air out the leg.”
His own suit would have cut off the break with bulkheads like tourniquets. Possibly his lower leg was already frozen and a goner, but the suits were good at isolating leaks, and managing shock too. She took the hose extruding from her belt and stuck the end of it into the little hole in his suit; it was less than a centimeter across, barely enough to admit the hose end. She stuck her finger in the hole on the other side of his leg, jetted warm air into the leg of his suit, held everything in place. All the while she was exclaiming, “Wahram, I’m here, wake up!”
Only Pauline replied: “Please be quiet. I can’t hear his vitals when you talk like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s breathing. His heart is beating.”
“What about the lower leg here?”
“The skin is frostbitten, probably the flesh too. His blood pressure is ninety over fifty, so he’s lost a lot of blood. He’s in shock.”
“Stabilize him, warm him up! Take over his suit!”
“Please be reassured. I am in communication with his suit. Be quiet, please.”
She shut up and let the qube work. Emergency medical treatment was an ancient AI algorithm, honed for centuries and long since proved to be better than a human response. And Pauline was saying there was every reason to believe he could be stabilized.
But now Pauline said, “His suit is somewhat damaged. I want to take over its control functions.”
“Can you do it?”
“Yes. It is easiest to do plugged into him, so at that point you’ll have to stick together.”
“Even better, just do it.”
Swan went to work on the hole in the leg of his suit. The suit could be repaired with the patch kit in her belt, and she set to prepping the patch, tethered to him waist to waist by her power-and-information cord. They were spinning slowly through the stars but she did not look at them. The patch kit’s patches were mostly squares with rounded edges; you had to pull off a backing and then apply smoothly and press during the time of the chemical reaction.
When his suit was sealed she asked Pauline if she should do anything for his leg at the point of the wound. This was perhaps backward, but she was rattled, she saw. Besides Pauline said no. “His suit has applied air compression and coagulants,” Pauline said. “The bleeding has substantially stopped.”
“Is the suit giving him IVs?”
“Yes.”
It was a comfort to remind herself that his spacesuit was not only a small flexible spaceship, but also a medical sleeve of considerable power, a kind of personal hospital.
“Wahram, are you there?” she said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m here,” he croaked. “I’m not all right.”
“What hurts?”
“My leg hurts. And I feel… sick. I’m trying not to throw up.”
“Good—don’t throw up. Pauline, can you get some antinausea into him?”
“Yes.”
They floated there in the starry night. Though Swan did not like to admit it, there was nothing more to be done at the moment. The Milky Way was like a skein of white glowing milk, with the Coal Sack and other black patches in it even more black than usual. Everywhere else the stars salted the blackness so finely that the black itself was compromised—as if behind the black, pressing intensely on it, was a whiteness greater than the eye would be able to take in. The pure black in the Milky Way must indicate a great deal of coal in the Coal Sack. Was all the black in the sky made by dust? she wondered. If all the stars in the universe were visible, would the night sky be pure white?
The big stars seemed to lie at different distances from them. Space popped as she saw that, became an extension outward rather than a backdrop hanging a few kilometers away. They were not in a black bag, but in an infinite extension. A little reckoning in a great room.
“Wahram, how are you feeling?”
“A little better.”
That was good. It was dangerous to throw up inside a helmet, not to mention unpleasant.
So they floated in space. Some hours passed. Their food came in the form of liquids one could suck from a straw in the helmet; there were even chunks of nutrition bars that could be extruded from an inside port in the cheek of the helmet, chewed off, and swallowed. Swan did both these. She peed into her suit’s diaper.
“Wahram, are you hungry at all?”
“Not hungry.” He didn’t sound comfortable either.
“Are you nauseated again?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not good. Here, I’m going to get us stabilized against the stars. You’ll feel some tugging. Maybe you should close your eyes until I get us settled.”
“No.”
“All right, it won’t be very fast anyway. Here we go.” She jetted against their spin; it was hard to do it with his weight added loosely to her side. Better to hug him and make him a front weight. She did that and gave him a tiny squeeze; in response he only made a little complaining hum. She got them stabilized to the stars, more or less, and pointed so that they were looking at Venus. It was still in shadow. If the sunshield had been wrecked, or even damaged, they would have seen it, she was sure; some crescent, or maybe one region suddenly blazing white; and as they had been on the side of the umbrella that would have been struck, it did not seem to her that any lit part of Venus could be entirely on the other side of the planet from them. Well, maybe it could; she was disoriented, she had to admit. But it looked like the attack had been foiled.
“Pauline, can you tell us what happened to the ship and the sunscreen and all?”
“Radio reports are still first responses, but they indicate a collision happened as foreseen, between the ETH Mobile and a pebble mob of roughly four times the mass of the ship. This was as predicted within an order of magnitude, and the ship was going faster than the pebbles by enough to knock the bulk of the collision mass at a vector angling away from the sunscreen.”
“So it worked.”
“Except part of the ejecta from the collision hit the craft near us, and its explosion spread fragments, one of which hit Wahram.”
“Yes of course. But that was just bad luck.”
“Several people on that craft near us must have died.”
“I know that. Very bad luck. Hit by shrapnel, in effect. But the sunscreen was saved?”
“Yes. And the sunshield’s defense system has apparently attacked the ejecta that flew in its direction.”
“So now it believes in the pebble mob.”
“Or at least in the impactors coming at it. I can’t tell what its problem was before.”
“Was it aware of this new fine-grained imaging system of Wang’s?”
“Wang told them about it, but they are a closed system, to avoid tampering. I don’t know if they had joined the new surveillance or not.”
“Maybe closed systems are easier to tamper with than open ones. Could it have been compromised?”
“It seems unlikely. It’s under the control of the Venus Working Group, and they are considered very intent on security.”
Wahram added nothing to this conversation. Swan held his hand, squeezing from time to time. There was nothing more for them to do. He squeezed back, briefly, then his hand went slack.
“You all right?” she asked.
“Fair,” he replied.
“Have you tried to eat something?”
“Not yet.”
“Drink something?”
“Not yet.”
They floated in black space, weightless and warm. They were like little moons of Venus; or like little planets of their own, orbiting the sun. People sometimes talked about this situation as the return to the womb, the amniotic high. Take some entheogenic drugs, become a star child. And in fact it was not as dreadful a sight as it probably should have been. For a few moments Swan even fell asleep. When she opened her eyes again, it seemed to her that Venus was perhaps a little bigger. It made sense; when they left the ship, they must have been going at quite a significant speed.
“You still there?”
“Still here.”
Well, Swan thought. Here they were. Nothing to be done, except to wait. Waiting was never her preferred mode. Typically there was more to do than she had time for, so that she was always in a rush. Now it seemed long for a rescue from an evacuation. As they had been bailing out, there had been talk of ships in the area. Maybe Wahram had been knocked off in a strange direction; Swan had followed without any sense of that. Possibly they were leaving the plane of the ecliptic, thus the path of any ships coming to the rescue. Maybe the poor destroyed yacht was the only one in their area, and they would have to wait until all the other evacuees had been mopped up. The destruction of the little yacht was likely to be one of the chief sources of casualties in the whole affair, so surely that would attract attention. They would know they hadn’t collected everybody; they would keep looking; these suits had powerful transponders in them. Being out of the ecliptic thus probably best explained the delay. Or maybe picking everyone up was just taking a while. The last acceleration of the ETH Mobile might have meant it was going at a speed higher than most spaceships could reach when the last people left it, in which case the people were too. If everything was as it was supposed to be, then all the suits would support their occupants for ten days, and they had only been out there only, what—she had to ask Pauline—twenty hours. It seemed longer, shorter—she couldn’t tell. Venus was definitely a little bigger. Swan recalled stories of castaways, adrift unfound, frozen for the eons. How many had gone that way in the history of the world? Scores, hundreds, thousands? She heard in her head the chorus of the old Martian song:
I floated thinking of Peter
Sure I would be saved
But the stories lie
I’m left to die
Black space will be my grave
No doubt many of those unfortunates had drifted expecting till the end they would be saved. Hope drained away more slowly than the air and food in their suits; they would recall the story of Peter circling Mars, or some other marooned person who got rescued, and believe a little spaceship would presently appear and hover before them like a UFO, like redemption, like life itself. But for many it had never come, and at some last point they had had to admit that the story was false, or not true for them. True for others, but not for them; the others elect, they the preterite, the lost ones. The forgo
tten ones. Thus the stark Martian song.
Maybe this time they would join the forgotten ones. Swan stirred herself, checked the common band, a host of voices; went to the emergency band and croaked out a report, an inquiry. Half an hour later a reply came: they were on the radar, they were getting a rescue ship out to them; they were indeed out of the plane, and all responders were busy. But they were on the charts and help would be on its way eventually.
So… look around. Tell Wahram about it, reassure him. Try to relax.
She was not relaxed. A helpless dread seized her like a boiling of the blood. Pauline would therefore know of it; she might at this very moment be infusing her with antianxiety drugs out of the suit’s pharmacy. Swan hoped so. Nothing to do but wait. Keep breathing. Wait and see. It had been a luxury in her life always to be able to do something, never to have to wait. Now reality kicked in. Sometimes you had to wait for it.
Well, so be it. A wait wasn’t so bad. It was better than the blackliner. Venus was looking a little bit closer, and was maybe a little bit brighter—maybe the sunshield had been torn a little, at the edge nearest the explosion. She could see dark clouds swirling around a darker patch, possibly Ishtar’s highland. There were brighter and darker patches down there under the swirling clouds, but she had no sense of whether they represented frozen ocean or frozen land. There were no blues or browns or greens, just gray clouds over gray lands, dark and darker.
I feel better,” Wahram announced uncertainly, as if testing the assertion.
“Oh good,” Swan said. “Try drinking something. You’re probably dehydrated.”
“I am thirsty.”
More time passed. After a while Wahram began to whistle under his breath, one of the tunes he had whistled in the utilidor. Beethoven, she knew, and not one of the symphonies; so most likely it was from one of the late quartets. A slow movement. Possibly the one that Beethoven had written after recovering from an illness. A thanksgiving. She would only know for sure by the tune that came at the very end of it. It was one of the good ones, anyway. Softly she whistled an accompaniment to it, singing the lark inside her while squeezing his hand. The tune was slow, she could not just lark about in it, but had to find a way to be slow herself, to join him. Her lark brain remembered the parts to this tune that he had taught her under Mercury. During their submercurial existence, a whole lifetime ago it seemed. That life was gone; this one would go; not a lot of difference was made to this moment itself, whether they survived later or not. Oh the beauty of this song, something to twine with. The lark brain kept singing inside her, twisting up out of the slow tune. Different times get woven together.
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