by Lewis Shiner
“Not there,” Kane said. “You coming?”
“No,” Takahashi said. “I don’t think you’re going to find him until he’s ready for you to. Besides, I’ve got some work to do in there.” He pointed his thumb back toward the sick bay. “I can get into the main computer from there, I think.”
“Okay,” Kane said, and took hold of the door. The air pressure inside the center was Earth normal, 1000 millibars, three times the pressure outside, and he could feel the differential in his arms as he leaned back to pull it open. He could feel exhaustion eating into his anger, but beyond the adrenaline and fatigue poisons, he could still hear those faint, high voices urging him on.
He pulled up his mask and stepped into the sunlight. Curtis’s house was just ahead of him, at the end of a short path.
He felt a powerful sense of imminence, of some kind of storm about to break. The sky, he realized. It was the wrong color for daytime. It reminded him of the dark skies in Texas before tornadoes or floods, provoking the same subconscious responses.
He pressed the button next to the door of Curtis’s house and watched the camera mounted in the eaves turn automatically to focus on him. A few seconds later Molly’s voice came through the speaker grille.
With one hand on the doorframe to steady himself he said, “I’m looking for Curtis.”
“Come on inside,” she said.
He nearly asked for Curtis again, hearing in her voice that Curtis was not there, but instead he let another awareness move through him, a memory of her touch and scent that brought a dizzying sense of lightness to his groin.
His sudden erection seemed the focal point of a binding force, pulling him inevitably, inexorably, toward Molly. He pushed his way inside, let the pressure suck the door shut behind him.
Molly stood on the far side of the living room, retreating from Kane’s presence. The thin white cotton of her NASA undersuit revealed her body clearly; her nipples were slack, her muscles relaxed. “Sit down,” she said, and Kane sat on the edge of a long, low sofa. “Do want something? Coffee? A drink?”
“No,” he said. She could feel it too, he saw, the sexual symbolism of his having penetrated her house; she revealed it in the quick, nervous gestures of her hands. “Where’s Curtis?” he said.
“Out,” she said, holding his eyes for a moment, and then suddenly turning away. The room was crowded with plants: bamboo, palms, grasses, and ferns. The air smelled rich, primordial.
“Out where? I have to see him.”
“I’m afraid,” she said, her voice strained, unnatural, “he can’t be disturbed right now.”
Kane moved to his feet, took her by one wrist. “What are you saying? Where is he?” He felt as if he were reading the words; he was only aware of the nearness of her body, the heat of it.
“He…he keeps one of the abandoned houses with power and air. He’s there right now with Lena.”
Kane let go of her wrist. ‘‘I’m sorry,” he said. She took another step deeper into the hallway.
Lamps over the plants carved the curtained half-light into spaces that excluded Kane. He moved toward Molly again, drawn by her electric field, sensing their exchange of quanta as a tingling along his skin. As he touched her lightly on one arm, her current surged low in his spine.
“Kane…” she said, almost a plea, but he wasn’t sure for what. He sensed her uncertainty and fear, but they broke harmlessly over the momentum of his need.
She turned to face him. His palms followed the sides of her breasts to the long, smooth latissimus muscles along her sides. She gripped his elbows, her eyes losing focus.
In her bedroom the smell of her was stronger, warm and sweet. She turned and faced him again, tearing loose the velcro fasteners and exposing her breasts almost defiantly, pulling her arms free of the sleeves. Kane tugged at the knot in his belt, unwilling for just that instant to go on with it, the inevitable coupling and climax, preferring instead the complex emotional ambience of the seduction itself, the currents of power tinged with weakness and guilt, the hesitation, the surrender.
Molly kicked her clothes away and Kane shed his hipari, reaching back to push the revolver into the heap of olive drab material as he slid his trousers to the floor.
She sat on the edge of the bed, spine curved, breasts pointing downward, her nervousness aging her prematurely. Kane put one knee on the sheet next to her and pushed her gently by the shoulders until she lay on her back, arms extended behind her. He gripped her waist, just above the hips, where he could feel the primal power of her sexuality. Her legs opened to him and he could smell the heat and darkness of her, the scent turning sharp as she became aroused. He spread her labia with his thumbs and flicked his tongue into her cleft to get the taste of her.
Her hips moved slowly against the mattress. Her eyes were open, her teeth pinning her lower lip. Kane wondered what she saw.
He raised her knees until her heels sank into the bed, and then, left hand under her buttocks, he guided himself into her with the other.
His hands moved up her body, fingertips just brushing her fragrant skin, his weight shifting forward to rest on his left elbow and right palm. He held himself rigid, motionless, feeling the tension coiling in his spine. His breath began to come more quickly as the pleasure burned through his groin, across his hips, and down into the contractions of his toes.
Then, slowly, he began to move in and out of her, lowering himself until he could feel the mass of her breasts against his damaged ribs. Her hands tangled themselves in the sheet behind her head, clawing at it in rhythmic contractions. Her excitement built slowly, seemingly against her will, until her jaw and shoulders were tight with it.
A ringing split the silence.
Kane looked up, saw the bedside phone flashing red. Molly seemed oblivious, introverted, locked into a divergent, subjective reality. The sudden, convulsive pressure of her pubic ridge confused and disoriented him, then he realized she was approaching orgasm.
He touched the hard point of her left nipple and she rolled him over onto his back, both her hands on the bandages of his chest, rocking hard until her entire body shook. Kane held her hips and thrust against her, not letting her finish. His throat muscles went tight. He felt his eyes roll back in his head and his leg muscles spasm as he pumped his climax into her, and when it was done they lay without moving, her head and breasts resting on his chest, his hot fluid turning cool as it flowed back down his shaft and pooled on the sheet under him, the red light of the phone still flashing, silently now, at the far end of the bed.
They had reached the neutrality of afternoon.
Molly rolled onto her back. After a time she said, “When you find him, what happens then?”
“I don’t know,” Kane told her. “Does it matter to you? How much do you care what happens to him?”
“Once upon a time,” she said, “everything in the universe was in one great, huge ball of fire. All the bits and pieces were controlled by the same interactions. Everything was symmetrical.”
Kane turned on his side to look at her.
“Then things started to cool down,” she said. “The symmetry broke down. One by one the different interactions turned into different things. Gravity, strong, weak, electromagnetic forces. Particles formed atoms and molecules and stars and planets and people. At every step the symmetrical patterns had to break down to become more complex. But without that symmetry breaking, there could never have been any life or intelligence in the universe.”
“I don’t get it,” Kane said. “What are you saying?”
“Things break up. Marriages break up. But they were once together. Everything in the universe still has that memory of having been part of the same thing. Everything is still connected.”
“Like you and Curtis, is that it? Still connected?”
She didn’t answer him. She lay for another moment, totally relaxed, and then suddenly swung around to the end of the bed and snatched the telephone receiver. She keyed four digits, waited, then sa
id, “Molly.”
Kane propped his head on one hand to watch her. She had eluded him somehow, despite the intensity of their physical coupling.
“Yes,” she said to the phone. “All right. I’ll be there.” She hung up, then stared at the floor, as if trying to focus her energies.
“Curtis?” Kane asked.
“No,” she said. “It’s the Russian ship. They’re coming in.”
EIGHT
SHE WENT TO her closet and looked for something dignified to wear to meet the Russians. The best she could find was a sort of orange padded cape and trousers.
Her own calmness surprised her, even frightened her a little. She’d just been unfaithful, for the first time in 13 years of marriage, and it was like nothing had happened at all.
No, she thought. Something had happened. Nothing as melodramatic as the end of her marriage; that had been over for years in any real sense. Something had changed inside her, not a sudden rush of guilt or desolation, but instead a growing sense of her own strength and power.
It had come from Kane. She remembered something Verb had said to her months ago, one of her feeble attempts at humor, when she was talking about her new physics as “quantified destiny.” She made some joke about “destinons,” quantum particles of fate that bound people and events through the fourth dimension.
For Molly there was more truth in the idea than even Verb would admit; she knew that she and Kane had exchanged more than bodily fluids and neural release.
Kane frightened her. He was quirky, nervous, with the dark, flitting eyes of a bird and an aura of suppressed violence that seemed detached from his intellect. But it wasn’t fear that had opened her so completely to him, and now, as she felt his fingers close on her arm, she promised herself that she would not be physically intimidated by him.
“You’d better get dressed,” she said.
“You’ve known about this,” he said. “How long?”
“They launched within a couple of days of your ship. They weren’t firing messages off at us like you guys were, but we picked up some of their signals back to Moscow. Morgan must have known. Didn’t he say anything to you?”
Kane took his hand away. “No. Of course not. What did you get from their signals?”
“Nothing. What’s there to say? They’re here for the same reason you are. Obviously.” In saying it she had identified Kane as her enemy, or at least her rival, but Kane seemed to miss the implicit threat.
“Good,” Kane said. “If I can find out what the Russians want, then maybe I’ll know something.”
Is he joking? she wondered. She took her clothes into the bathroom, and when she came back Kane had dressed.
“What about Curtis?” Kane asked. “Is he going to be there?”
“There’s no telling. If he wants to know about it, then he knows.”
Kane said, “I don’t see the two of you together, somehow.”
Molly shrugged. “He’s changed. You want to see the landing?”
“Why not?”
“Walk with me.”
They masked and went outside. Kane looked even more predatory in his mask, Molly thought. It left nothing to focus on but those black, shark-like eyes.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe he hasn’t changed, not really. It’s so easy to talk about power corrupting and all that. But which came first, the idealism, or the lust for power? I mean, maybe all the ideals were just a means to an end.”
“What kind of ideals are we talking about?”
“Nine years ago, when everything went wrong, Curtis saved this place.” She moved her hand and the circle took in the dome over their heads, the orange grove around them, two teenage girls leaning against one of the living modules, wires leading from their temples to a small metal box. “He did it just about singlehandedly. All anybody cared about was getting through from one day to the next, and it wasn’t enough. Then Curtis comes along and starts talking about twenty, thirty, fifty years ahead.
“I think it was the first time any of us confronted the fact that we’d given up, we’d all decided there wasn’t going to be a twenty years from now. Curtis changed that. He said we didn’t need Earth, that we could make our own Earth, only better. It sounds trite and stupid when I say it, but Curtis painted it, he sold it, until we could all feel it and smell it and taste it. Just the idea, just the hope that you could look at the sky without having a sheet of plastic between you and it.”
“Terraforming,” Kane said.
“Then you’ve heard all this.”
“Just the word, is all.”
“Curtis believed in the ‘pressure point’ approach, that you can change a few little things and get big results. Like if you dumped some dust on the poles, the heat absorption would melt the ice and increase the atmospheric pressure which would start a greenhouse effect which would melt more ice. There’s supposed to be enough frozen junk at the poles and around here on the Tharsis ridge to bring us up to a full bar of pressure, same as Earth.”
“That’s a lot to happen in twenty or thirty years.”
“Sure, but in the meantime you’ve got oases. Drop some ring ice from Jupiter or Saturn, say, into a nice low area and blow out a crater ten kilometers deep. You’ve got heat and gasses from the impact, and the crater will hold the higher air pressure.”
Kane stopped, put his hands in his trouser pockets. “What are you, crazy? ‘Drop some ring ice.’ How the hell are you going to go get this ice? With a leftover MEM and some ice water for propellant?”
He really doesn’t know, she thought. About the physics, the transporter, the antimatter, none of it.
“It’s not impossible,” she said. “We have to make everything here. The air you’re breathing out of that tank is manufactured. We can make rocket fuel, we can make stages, we can fix the ships still in orbit. We could do it.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“It…I don’t know. It was just too hard, I guess. It would take sacrifices. There’d be less booze, less energy for Curtis and his pals to go riding around in the jeeps. By the time we’d sacrificed long enough that we could actually talk about building the ships, everybody was tired of sacrifices.”
“Even you?”
“Maybe even me, a little. But I could stand it, if it would give us ships. And if we had ships I wouldn’t just go to Saturn and turn back. You know? I mean, sure, build the oases, but don’t stop there. Not with the rest of the universe out there, waiting.”
“You sound like Reese.”
With good reason, she thought. She said, “Yeah, I suppose I do.” She looked back and saw Blok hurrying toward them. She had a moment of panic—Blok would be able to tell at a glance that she and Kane had been to bed, he would tell Curtis—but it passed as quickly as it came. It was the same as with the Russians. If Curtis wanted to know he probably already knew. She didn’t doubt for a nanosecond that he had his own bedroom as thoroughly wired as the rest of the dome.
She started walking again, pulling Kane along with her voice. “I suppose Curtis is as bad as any of them. He could have pushed harder, but I think it would have lost him his popularity. He’s smart enough to know that. But I think he really bought the dream. He wouldn’t want to admit it, but I think it’s really been eating at him the last five or six years, knowing that we could be trying for something better and we aren’t.”
She opened the hatch to the suit room and started down the line of Rigid Experimental suits, looking for her favorite. From the corner of her eye she saw Kane peel off his hipari and clumsily stuff it into one of the lockers. She’d seen the same awkwardness when he’d undressed in her bedroom, and she suddenly understood that he was hiding something in the jacket. A weapon? she wondered. What in God’s name for, if he had no idea of what was happening?
To hell with it, she thought. Let Curtis sort it out.
But the idea terrified her nonetheless. If it was a handgun, it was a threat to all of them, a lighted match in a room flooded with oxygen, wh
ere even steel would burn. Only a fool, or a lunatic, would have one. She was afraid Kane might be a little of both.
Blok came in while she was helping Kane into his suit. He stared at them for a second or two, his eyes half closed in what Molly thought of as his “inscrutable Russian” look. Then he introduced himself to Kane.
“So,” he said. “What should I expect from my former countrymen?” he asked. “Rumor has it the Supreme Soviet is no more.”
Molly felt protective toward Kane, responsible, at least, for her attraction to him. She tried to will him into politeness, if only for her sake.
“To be honest,” Kane, said affably, “we don’t hear much. The government went under, some kind of Army coup. And then the Army just kind of went to pieces. The Kazakhs against the Uzbeks against the Byelorussians and so on.”
“Tipichno,” Blok said. “Typical. Naturally the Army had to get rid of the KGB, so when the Army went there was nothing.”
“Just the obshchestvi, like Aeroflot, and a few of the stronger labor unions, the steelworkers and the miners. And they ended up incorporating.”
“Ah,” Blok said. “How Russians love a purge. Chistka, they call it. The cleaning. Out with socialism, the God that failed! In with western corporations! Bluejeans! Rock and roll!” He seemed genuinely happy, his irony buried so deeply that it, or any of his other true political feelings, would never betray him.
She twisted the clumsy, oblong helmet of her suit into place and switched on the PLSS. The suit had an external microphone and speaker that allowed her a direct link to the outside world; she used the speaker to tell Blok and Kane to hurry.
As she stood outside, watching the growing point of brightness in the sky, she found herself impatient to get the spacecraft on the ground, to get the last of the waiting over with. Once I know it all, she thought, once all the bad news is in, then we can decide what to do about it.