by Spider
And I didn’t even thank him.
“You are going too fast,” came a voice from all around her. “Please slow down.” She flinched, and then realized it was only an AI traffic cop; she was exceeding the local jaunting speed limit. She decelerated at once.
“Thank you,” she said. “That is very good advice.”
14
RAND HAD COME TO FEEL that his favorite part of the Shimizu was the corridors. They were designed to be visually appealing, padded enough for the most inexpert jaunter, and offered an ever-changing parade of rich and almost-rich people to gawk at. They were the place where one flew, where you could enjoy the sensation of a jaunt that was not over within seconds. Most important to him, they represented the blessed hiatus between the problems of the studio and the problems of the home. They were the equivalent of a solitary drive from office to home back on Terra: the place of unwinding from work, and of winding other mechanisms back up again.
But sooner or later the corridors always led him back to his door. He was coming to think of it as the Place of Sighs; whichever direction he was going, he always seemed to pause just outside the threshold and sigh, first.
He did so now, decided he was ready to enter his home, and thumbed the doorlock.
Before he could enter, something burst from the room and enveloped him. Its first effect was as invigorating as a cool rain on a dry afternoon: his wife’s laughter…
As a musician he found it one of the Universe’s more glorious sounds; as a husband he found it exhilarating. In either capacity, he had been missing it lately. Like an addict following the smell of smoke, he followed it inside, seeking the source.
Rhea was in the living room, a little northeast of the window. She was sitting in the piece of furniture in which she usually did her writing—she moved around as she wrote, and hated the sound of Velcro separating as she did—but her seat belt was not fastened. And she had configured the furniture in the shape which its menu called “love-seat.” In its other corner, also unstrapped, was a broadly grinning Duncan Iowa. He had just opened his mouth to say something, to make Rhea laugh again, when he caught sight of Rand in the doorway. “Hello, Rand,” he said.
Rhea turned, smiling. “Hi, darling,” she said. “You must be exhausted—would you like a drink?”
He controlled a frown. “Why would I be exhausted?”
She looked surprised. “Well…the premiere is only a week away, right?”
“Sure—but my part was done yesterday. Jay and the dancers will be killing themselves from here on in, muscle-memorizing it, but I’m just there babysitting the software and looking for holes. I told you that last night.”
“Oh. I forgot.”
“Never mind.” He had been hoping to hear some more of her laughter, and now she wasn’t even smiling anymore. Nice work. “What were you guys laughing about? I could use a giggle.”
She shook her head. “It’d take too long to explain it. Duncan just came up with a neat way to improve some comic business in a story I’m working on.”
“Oh. I see.” In ten years of marriage, Rhea had never permitted Rand—or anyone—to see or hear about a work-in-progress. It was one of her many writer’s superstitions. “A story is like a soufflé,” was the line he had heard her tell people a hundred times.
“Where’s Colly?”
“Studying.” She glanced at her watch. “No, by now the terminal has unlocked, so she’s probably playing games or watching a movie.”
He nodded. “As long as she’s not on the phone again. That kid will talk away our air money one of these days.”
“Oh, no, she can’t be—I’ve got the White Rabbit set to warn me if she asks for a phone circuit.”
“The which?”
“The White Rabbit,” Duncan said. “It’s her new name for Harvey. He’s still a rabbit, but he’s shorter, and dressed like the Tenniel version. You know, the guy who illustrated the original Alice books.”
Rand was doubly irritated: that a strange man knew more about his daughter than he did, and that this young lout thought the best damn shaper in human space needed to be told who Tenniel was. But he still had faint hopes of hearing Rhea laugh again sometime tonight, so he pasted a big happy smile on his face. “Ha ha,” he said, as if reading the words from a page. “That’s cute. Pocket watch and all, eh?” I know the fucking books, sonny. “We’d better be careful what she eats and drinks. If she starts to grow, we’ll need a bigger suite.”
He was rewarded with a grin from his wife. “I don’t think there is such a thing. If she does, we’ll have to put her in the pool: she can have it all to herself.”
“I think Colly would really like that,” Duncan said.
“Can you stay for dinner, Duncan?” Rand asked, in the tone of voice that both sounds perfectly sincere and conveys the subtext, a negative answer is expected.
The lad was not completely mannerless; he pushed himself away from the love-seat and looked around for anything he might have left. “No, thanks, I have to—”
A braying sound interrupted him, for all the world like a burro’s mating call. All three froze.
“FLARE WARNING, CLASS ONE,” said a very loud voice. “THIS IS A SAFETY EMERGENCY. ALL GUESTS MUST GO AS QUICKLY AND CALMLY AS POSSIBLE TO THE NEAREST RADIATION LOCKER, AND REMAIN THERE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. THERE IS NO CAUSE FOR ALARM AS LONG AS YOU SEEK SHELTER NOW. IF YOU HAVE A SPECIAL PROBLEM, ONLY, PHONE ‘FLARE EMERGENCY’ AND HELP WILL ARRIVE AT ONCE. WAVE-FRONT X-RAYS EXPECTED IN NINE MINUTES, TWENTY SECONDS. CLASS ONE FLARE WARNING—” It began to repeat.
“Volume mute!” Rand barked, and the voice went away. “Duncan, you’re staying.”
“I shouldn’t,” he said. “I’ve got my own bolt hole, two minutes away—that’s seven minutes cushion.”
“Don’t be silly,” Rhea said. “There’s plenty of room in our locker, I’ve seen it. This suite was built for up to six.” Still Duncan looked hesitant. “For heaven’s sake, we’re going to be in there with Colly for what, three hours to three days? With no phone, no TV, completely cut off from the Net? We need you, Duncan.”
He grinned. “That logic I understand.”
“We’re wasting time,” Rand snapped, and led the stampede.
By thoughtful design, access to the radiation locker was through Colly’s room. They expected to find her in a panic—but as they cleared the door they found her oblivious, wearing earphones and fixated on a screen, talking on the phone with a hush-filter. She flinched sharply when she became aware of them; on Earth she would have jumped a foot in the air. In free-fall the same reflex causes one to tumble erratically; she flailed like an octopus to regain her balance. “It was just for a minute,” she cried. “I was just gonna hang up, really!”
Rand got a grip on an ankle as it went past, swarmed up her and yanked the earphones out. “Quiet, Colly!” he said, trying to control his voice carefully so as to command instant attention without scaring her.
It seemed to work. “What is it, Daddy?”
“It’s all right, baby—there’s a flare on the way, but it’s only Class One. We’re all going on a picnic together for a little while. Wanna come?”
Her eyes got big and round. “Sure, Dad. Can I bring the White Rabbit? Harvey, I mean? I changed his name.”
“So I hear. I’m sorry, honey—radiation lockers are meant to keep electrons out, and that’s pretty much what the White Rabbit’s made of. We’re going to have to rough it, like they did in the Olden Days. Do you have any books around?”
“Hard copy, you mean? None I haven’t read a jillion times. You mean no games, or anything?”
“Only if they’re free-standing, hon. Nothing that uses the Net. Get your Anything Box.” It was a nanotechnological toy-set, which could be caused to become a range of things, from a 3-D chess set to a Monopoly board to Scrabble game.
“I forgot to charge it,” she wailed.
Duncan already had the locker hatch open, and was waving Rhea to enter; she held ba
ck. “Come on, Colly,” he called. “You don’t need machines to play games.”
“You don’t?” She looked dubious. “Okay.” She started for the hatch. “Hey—what about supper?”
“That kitchenette will make sandwiches in under two minutes,” Rhea said, and began to turn toward the door. “We’ve got about seven left—”
“No, Rhea!” Duncan ordered. “That was a best-guess, and you don’t screw around with a flare emergency, for anything. There’s food and water in the locker—come on!”
“Go ahead,” Rand said. “I’ve got Colly.”
Rhea gave up and went to the hatch. Duncan caught her as she arrived, and handed her through the door. To guide a body from behind in free-fall without causing it to tumble, one pushes the buttocks. Rand had been in space long enough to know that, so he couldn’t even be annoyed. He put his attention on his daughter. “Push off on me, hon,” he said, and spread-eagled himself facing the hatch. Colly doubled up, put her feet against his stomach, and jumped. He used his thrusters to recover and follow her. Her aim was superb; she went through the hatch like a perfect slam-dunk and into Rhea’s arms.
Duncan seemed to have assigned himself the role of doorman; he waited for Rand to precede him. “After you, son,” Rand said gruffly. And as Duncan turned, he pushed the lad in, the same way he had done for Rhea.
The next few hours were not particularly pleasant ones.
Perhaps no one has ever spent a really comfortable three hours in a radiation locker. They were the only cubics in the Shimizu which could reasonably be called “spartan,” being simple boxes designed to keep a human alive for up to three and a half days despite the best efforts of energetic protons to kill him. (X-rays, although they arrive first, and keep coming as the following plasma cloud of electrons and protons strikes hull metal, are not a problem: a mere millimeter of aluminum will stop most of them.) A radiation locker is very easy to get into, impossible to get out of until the emergency is past, and will supply breathable air, potable water, digestible food substitutes, basic emergency medical care, and plumbing facilities. Period. If one wishes to make it congenial, one can stock it with one’s own free-standing computer gear, library of music and literature, programmable furniture, or a supply of gourmet delights, for there is a fair amount of room. But almost no one ever does…for the same reason that people still build at the base of volcanos. Bad solar flares are quite uncommon for about nine and a half out of every eleven years. When the tornados come once every decade or so, it is easy to forget to keep the storm shelter adequately stocked. So most visits there begin with a mournful inventory that is finished all too soon, followed by the dawning realization that this will be a sentence.
In this case, Rand decided early on not to dwell on the dark side of things, and resolved instead to concentrate on what could be accomplished while in here. So he checked his mental buffer, and found a task waiting: chewing his daughter out for using the telephone against express orders. But to his intense annoyance, Duncan interceded on her behalf (“butted in,” was how Rand phrased it to himself), claiming that she deserved praise for having figured out how to circumvent an AI lock. When he rejected this as irrelevant, Colly took over her own defense, presenting in a shrill voice the novel theory: “Anyway, I’m not even getting a real birthday party; space stinks and I want to go home.”
Since Rand had been counting on Colly’s enthusiasm for space to help win over Rhea, he took recourse in a strangled silence. Rhea had privately asked him, several days ago, about interfacing his shaping equipment with the phone so that the friends at Colly’s party could at least be convincing fakes. At the time he had been too busy, and said he would “think about it,” but later he had thought it through in financial terms only, and rejected the idea on those grounds. He wanted mightily now to promise—to have promised—to do it…but he could not construct a logic-bridge that would get him from “You’re spending too much money on the phone” to “I’m going to help you spend a king’s ransom on the phone,” and did not have Colly’s daredevil indifference to logic to help him. He made a firm private resolution to tackle the project—and banged his nose on the fact that he could not even begin for…how long did Class One flare emergencies generally last, anyway? He was forced to ask Duncan. And the answer—three hours to three days; we’ll know when the door opens—did not please him. It began to dawn on him that he was going to have to fill an indeterminate time with small talk, with a wife whom he had hurt, a child he had disappointed, and a young man who was beginning to annoy the hell out of him.
In the end, it was only eight hours, and even they were not the horrors they might have been. But only because Rhea rose heroically to the occasion, and almost singlehandedly carried the group on her shoulders, quelling negative emotions by sheer force of personality. She changed subjects, she suggested topics, she refereed potential disputes before they could occur, and she took upon herself any housekeeping task that might otherwise have brought Rand and Duncan into contact.
Eventually she bullied them all into the proper bomb shelter spirit. She told them endless stories, some pirated and some improvised. She cajoled Rand into singing the songs he sang best. Duncan reached back into the memory banks of a childhood in circumstances so primitive (by contemporary Terran standards) that he had frequently been deprived of amusement facilities, and pulled out game after game that could be played without tools or power. Before long Colly too was making her unique contribution: giggling. Not long after her usual bedtime, she fell asleep, but a child’s snores and other sleepsounds are nearly as uplifting as her giggles. And it is difficult for a conversation to turn to an argument if there is a child sleeping in the room. Before long, Rand had regained his original impression of Duncan as a decent enough young man—just needed a little seasoning among Terrans to learn the fine points of good manners, that was all. After all, Rhea seemed to like him, and she had good people radar.
Good spirits might not have lasted, but luck was with them: just as group morale peaked, the locker door opened and a loud voice began reassuring them that everything was fine. They managed to silence it before it could wake Colly, and emerged smiling together. Duncan had the grace to make his excuses and leave nearly at once. By the time Rand had finished seeing him out the door, Rhea had put Colly into her sleepsack and gone to their bedroom; he put the suite to sleep and joined her. He was quite tired; the only things he intended to do before sleeping were check to make sure their AIs were still sentient, and make sure that if there were any casualties, no one he knew was on the list.
But by the time he reached the bedroom, Rhea was more than halfway out of her clothes.
“Uh…” he managed to get out before the process was complete, and then she advanced on him like a cloud of electrons and protons. His own clothing was no protection at all. His next syllable was some five minutes later, and was even less spellable; he repeated it several times over the next few minutes, with increasing volume and decreasing period. The last iteration was a shout, which by then seemed to him to contain all the information the universe out there desperately needed to hear—until he heard Rhea shriek the message’s other half in harmony with him.
Before he fell asleep, he regained enough intelligence to compose a platitude, something along the lines of “Out of adversity comes fortitude.” Maybe…just maybe…Rhea was going to snap into it.
Talking work with Jay wasn’t as much fun as it had been; with four days left before the premiere of Kinergy (as they had decided to name the new work) Jay had too much else to do, Rand had too little else to do, and there was nothing to discuss together but things that might go wrong. And the incessant ego-struggles and other personal frictions among the dancers—but Rand hated that particular topic. He had himself pointedly chosen a field that allowed him to work alone when it suited him.
So he had no digression to propose when Jay said, “How’s it going with Rhea, bro?”
He decided to tackle it. “You know, last week I’d
have said it was fucking hopeless. But it’s the funniest thing: somehow that flare emergency seems to have turned things around. At least a little, anyway. She came through it like a trouper, never complained once, never even frowned—and as soon as it was over, so was she: all over me. We haven’t had a session like that since…Jesus, I don’t know, but whenever it was, it was back on Earth. It felt…it felt like christening the Shimizu, christening space. Do you know what I mean?”
Jay nodded at once. “Ethan and I christened High Orbit that way, once.”
Rand winced away from the thought. Obviously the event had not cemented Ethan’s commitment to living in space very effectively. “I mean, it’s like when I first moved to P-Town. I’d never lived by the ocean, and I wasn’t sure if I could take that much horizon. And the storms, you know, the winds. And then we went through our first hurricane together, and it was hard, but when it was over I felt like, ‘Well, that wasn’t so bad; I can live here.’ Sitting in a radiation locker isn’t fun…but it’s a lot more fun than sitting in a singles bar. Maybe she’s going to steady down and learn to live here.”
“But it’s still that much up in the air, is it? With four days to curtain? You have to give Kate an answer one way or another the following week.”
“I know, I know. But it’s the kind of problem where you can’t push for an answer, no matter how urgent it is.”
“Well, all I’m saying is, if she bails out, don’t necessarily assume that you have to follow her—for keeps, I mean. Just because Ethan and I couldn’t make it work on a commuter basis doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Look at that Philip Rose and his wife—and he’s a writer, like Rhea. Quite a few spacers have made marriage with a groundhog work.”
“You really think it’s an option? After what happened to you?”
“Well, maybe not a great one. But it might be worth giving it a year and seeing how it works.” He seemed to start to say something, and then changed his mind. “I’m just being selfish, bro. Kinergy is a good piece. I like working with you; I don’t want to give it up. Losing partners is a habit I’m trying to break.”