Dolph paused as if he were lost in memory, then sighed. “That’s when it happened.”
He fell silent; might have been finished.
In spite of herself, Min wanted him to go on. His voice or his story had a mesmerizing quality: it carried her with it. And she wasn’t alone. She could see at a glance that every head in the corridor was turned toward him. Foster bit his lip while he waited as if he didn’t like the suspense.
Compelled by the unexpected silence, someone offered tentatively, “Hallucinations?”
Dolph shook his head. “Worse than that.” Suddenly his dark face broke into a grin like a sunrise. “I fouled my suit.
“I mean the whole suit.” Laughter welled up in him from some core of personal amusement. “Talk about hot shit!” He started chortling, then began to laugh as if he were telling the best joke he knew, the best joke of his life. “You would think I hadn’t been to the head for a week. By the time I was done, the bridge, I mean the entire bridge, stank like a backed-up waste treatment plant. Our communications third actually puked because she couldn’t stand the smell.”
His mirth was infectious. Several of his people laughed with him as if they couldn’t help themselves. A dozen others chuckled.
While his laughter subsided, he concluded, “Our medtech was right. I was fucking depressed for weeks.”
Shaking his head, he pulled himself past the hammocks and coasted away in the direction of his quarters. As he left, his shoulders continued to quake as if he were still laughing.
Together Min and Foster drifted back into sickbay and let the doors close.
The medtech didn’t look at her. Frowning like a man who wasn’t sure of the propriety of what he’d just witnessed, he asked, “Is that story true, Director?”
She nodded. “Yes. His captain told me years ago. I’d forgotten all about it.” A moment later she added, “But the way his captain told it, it wasn’t funny.”
Sounding wiser than his years, Foster murmured, “It wouldn’t work if it weren’t true.” Then he returned to his console and monitors.
An hour later, during another brief patch of clear space, Dolph chimed Min in her cabin to let her know that twenty-one of his SAD-afflicted people had released themselves from sickbay and gone back to their duties.
She still wasn’t sure what it was he’d done, but obviously it’d succeeded.
“You couldn’t have faked that,” she informed him sternly. “You really think that old story is funny.”
She wanted to ask him, How? How do you do that? But the words stuck in her throat.
“Of course,” he replied through a yawn. “I wanted to give them some other way to think about how they felt. I don’t mean physically. How they felt emotionally. Mentally.” Almost echoing Foster, he explained, “It wouldn’t work if I had to fake it.”
Another yawn came across the intercom. “Forgive me, Min. I’d better take a nap while I have the chance.”
Her speaker emitted a small snik as he severed the connection.
For a while as Punisher wrenched and dove through the system in the direction of Deaner Beckmann’s lab, Min lay sealed in her g-sheath and tried to imagine herself laughing at Warden Dios. Or laughing with him at the way she felt about some of his recent actions.
She couldn’t do it.
DAVIES
With Morn’s training as well as his own experience, Davies listened to the ship. He felt the complex pressure of the drives, gauged the various vectors of braking and maneuvering g. When Trumpet entered the asteroid swarm which surrounded and protected the Lab, he knew the difference.
The change was obvious. Quick variations on a comparatively low velocity had a different effect than changes to avoid obstacles at high speed. And each course shift as Trumpet had crossed the Massif-5 system had been followed by a matching return to the original heading: pressure on one side; then pressure on the other. But in the swarm every g-kick of thrust belonged to an ongoing series of new trajectories as Trumpet dodged back and forth among the rocks.
Lying paralyzed in his g-sheath and webbing tormented Davies. All his energies—mental, emotional, metabolic—burned at too high a temperature: most of the time he needed movement more than he needed rest. In addition the discomfort of his ribs and arm and head galled him. Despite his elevated recuperative resources and all the drugs sickbay had given him, his body couldn’t heal fast enough to suit him.
A restlessness as severe as panic impelled him. As soon as Trumpet broached the swarm, he risked getting off his bunk.
He could use his arm: his cast gave the still-fragile bones enough protection. And the more flexible acrylic around his ribs supported his chest adequately. As long as Nick didn’t hit him with too much g, he could move without damaging himself.
Simply because his need was so great, he spent ten minutes pumping himself like a piston between the deck and ceiling of the cabin—the zero-g equivalent of pushups. Then he used the san cubicle; scrubbed himself in the needle spray for a long time, trying to clean away the sensation of Angus’ betrayal.
But when the vacuum drain had sucked the water away and dried his skin, he decided not to put on a clean shipsuit. He’d worn the same strange black Amnion fabric since the hour of his birth. It wasn’t especially comfortable, but he needed its alienness—needed external reminders of where he’d come from, who he was. Whenever he let his defenses down, he forgot that he wasn’t Morn. Sleeping, he dreamed her dreams.
Maybe that was the real reason he couldn’t endure much rest.
Thrust punched his shoulder against one wall. Not hard: just enough to remind him that he should be careful. And that he had to check on Morn.
Wrapped in her webbing and sheath, she slept the flat, helpless sleep of too much cat. Repeated doses which he’d pushed between her slack lips had kept her unconscious so long that he began to wonder if she would be able to wake up. The medtechs in the Academy had enjoyed telling cautionary tales about men and women overdosed with cat who sank so far down into themselves that they never returned.
He looked at the cabin chronometer: she was due to receive another capsule—or begin waking up—in forty minutes.
After a moment he decided he couldn’t wait that long. In spite of the danger, he unsealed her from her bunk and lifted her out.
At once he noticed that she’d fouled her shipsuit. Nobody could sleep as long as she had and stay clean.
Without transition the rank, sweet smell triggered memories—
This had happened to her before; happened to him. When Angus had first brought him aboard Bright Beauty, Angus had strapped him down on the sickbay table to immobilize him. Fresh with horror from the destruction of Starmaster, the slaughter of the Hyland clan, Davies or Morn had cried and wailed, screamed against the deaf walls until he’d lost his voice; lost his mind. Then Angus had shot him full of cat—
—and when he’d awakened, still in the EVA suit which had brought him to Bright Beauty from Starmaster’s wreck, this smell was everywhere, filling the sickbay, filling his head. Angus’ power over him began with murder and gap-sickness; blood and the clarity of self-destruct.
Asleep in her son’s arms, Morn whimpered softly and turned her head aside, as if he’d disturbed her with bad dreams.
Her small sound and movement brought him back to himself.
Sudden sweat streaked his cheeks. His heart labored as if he were fighting for his life. That was Morn’s smell; her ordeal, not his: it was her memory. Her nightmare—
When he lost the distinction, let himself forget who he was, he became as mad as she’d been then.
Oh, Morn.
No doubt he ought to be crazy. Nevertheless while he could still tell what sanity was, he clung to it. Morn needed him; that came first. Later he would try to get rid of the stink in other ways.
Grim with determination, he drew her weightless body into the san. His stomach twisted as he pulled off her shipsuit and propped her in the cubicle. At least she would be spare
d this one memory: she was still asleep. He set the jets to produce a fine mist which wouldn’t drown her. While the water ran, he disposed of her soiled shipsuit, then hunted for a clean one that might fit her.
More jolts knocked him from side to side as Trumpet dodged. Each one hit like a stun-prod of alarm: he feared its effect on Morn. But they weren’t hard enough to hurt him. They probably weren’t hard enough to trigger her gap-sickness.
When he went back to check on her, he heard her coughing in the mist. She sounded conscious.
He raised his voice so that she could hear him. “I’m right here. Nick hasn’t said anything yet, and I guess the others are still in their cabins, but I know we’re in the swarm. I assume we’re going to reach the Lab soon. I couldn’t stand to give you any more cat, so I decided to take the risk of waking you up.”
After a thin spasm of coughing, she murmured, “Thanks.”
She was awake. And sane. A sudden rush of relief left him light-headed and vulnerable; close to tears. No gap-sickness: not this time. Until that moment he hadn’t realized the extent of his fear. As far as he could remember, Morn had never tried controlling her mad certainty with cat. He hadn’t known it would work.
Shaking, he left the san and closed the door.
While he waited for her to finish, he did more zero-g pushups, working his body until the alien fabric of his shipsuit chafed his skin and he began to sweat so hard that he needed another shower; working the dread out of his muscles.
She emerged clean and dry; but too many hours of enforced sleep had done nothing to improve her appearance. She looked pale and thin, almost emaciated, as if she hadn’t eaten for days. Lingering cat dulled her gaze. Despite the absence of g, her movements seemed frail, confused. It was hard to believe she was the same woman who’d insisted, Don’t fight. Don’t refuse. Stay alive—don’t give him an excuse to kill you.
There’s a lie here. Somebody’s lying. We need to stay alive until we find out what it is.
But Angus hadn’t told Nick how to make another control for her zone implant. That memory belonged to Davies; he trusted it. He remembered it while he looked at her so that her weakness wouldn’t fill him with fresh panic.
She didn’t meet his gaze. Maybe she couldn’t focus her eyes. “Now what?” she asked wanly.
He shrugged. Droplets of sweat detached themselves from his face and became perfect globes. They caught the light like glass beads as they floated toward the scrubbers. “I guess we wait.” Wait for Trumpet to reach the Lab. Wait for Vector to attempt his analysis of the mutagen immunity drug. Wait for Nick to make a mistake. Or for Min Dormer to perform some inconceivable intervention. “I don’t have any better ideas.”
She shook her head. She didn’t either.
Trumpet remained relatively motionless for what seemed like a long time, then started moving again. Now every shift of course and nudge of thrust was gentle, cautious: the ship slid forward as if she were picking her way through a mine field. Davies fought an impulse to watch the chronometer. Instead he tried to guess by sheer intuition what Trumpet was doing.
She’d stopped so that Nick could talk to the Lab, get permission to approach. Now she was moving in. Slowly, so the Lab wouldn’t see her as a threat. So the Lab’s guns wouldn’t open fire on her. She must be close to her destination. If the matter cannon emplacements were too far out, rock and static would make accurate targ impossible. Scan installations might be anywhere in the swarm, reporting their data along long chains of remote transmitters, but the guns would be nearer the Lab.
OK: assume that made sense. How much longer? An hour? More? Less? Deliberately he avoided the chronometer. Because he needed movement, any kind of movement, he began doing pushups again. Gradually, without noticing it, he increased his pace. Up. Down. The directions were meaningless, of course—simply a frame of reference. Up down. Nevertheless the action of his body generated its own g; its own significance. Updown.
“Waiting is hard enough,” Morn murmured distantly. “You’re wearing me out. Why do you do that?”
He stopped himself on the edge of his bunk. Breathing hard—but steadily, as if he could have gone on for hours—he said, “I don’t like sitting still. I don’t even like rest. It scares me.”
As her last dose of cat wore off, some measure of elasticity had returned to her muscles, especially in her face. Her expression had slowly become more alert, less exposed. She tried to smile, with limited success. “How did I get a son like you? I feel just the opposite. I think I could rest”—she shrugged, grimaced—“practically forever. It’s movement that scares me. I’m afraid of what happens next.”
Then she added wryly, “I guess I’m turning into a coward in my old age. Considering the fact that I’m almost as young as you are, that isn’t easy to do. I’m probably going to set some kind of record.”
But Davies was in no mood for jokes. “Considering the fact,” he retorted harshly, “that you’ve already been through a lifetime of hell, you’ve earned the right to be afraid. It’s about time some of the rest of us started helping you. But you’re too far ahead of us. We can’t catch up.” Sib’s attempt to guard Nick had been a debacle. Neither Mikka nor Davies himself had been able to handle Angus. “For some reason, you’re always the one who helps us.”
Morn frowned. “I’m sure you’re right,” she countered. “I distinctly remember rescuing myself from the Amnion.”
“That was Angus and Nick,” Davies protested. Mikka and Sib. And Captain’s Fancy. “All I did was stand guard.”
Suddenly Morn was angry. “All you did,” she snapped back, “was stay sane when you should have gone completely crazy. All you did was scare the Bill so much that he couldn’t just hand you over to Nick or the Amnion. All you did was keep Nick from tricking Angus. How many of us would still be alive if you hadn’t done that? And since then you haven’t done anything except take care of me.
“Don’t tell me you aren’t helping. I can’t stand it—I need you too much.”
Davies felt a rush of chagrin he couldn’t stifle. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. I’m just”—shame and ineffectuality affected him like rage—“just lost. I don’t know who I am, or what I’m doing. You saved me twice when Nick tried to give me to the Amnion.” Once on Enablement. Once in the ejection pod. “When you call yourself a coward, it sounds like you’re telling me there’s nothing left I can count on.”
Morn took a deep breath, let it out in a long sigh. “I know. I don’t mean to be so touchy. All this waiting—” She pushed her hands through her hair, pulling herself back under control. “It wears on me. It goes on and on, and I don’t know what I’m still trying to hope for. Sometimes I can feel myself crumbling.”
He knew that feeling—or one just like it. Gritting his teeth, he clung to the edge of the bunk so that the restless pressure inside him wouldn’t take over.
He and Morn went on waiting.
They knew it when Trumpet came into her berth. The hull sounds of approach and dock were unmistakable. First came the steadily more gentle pressure of braking thrust, the slim fire of attitudinal jets: then the clangor of metal, amplified by constricted space, as the ship met the berth guides and slid along them: then the slap and groan of grapples, the final settling. And after that came the insertion of air hoses and communications lines, power cables and waste pumps—each with its characteristic hiss or thud or click, its telltale echo.
Gradually the distant, visceral whine of Trumpet’s drives subsided. She was at rest.
The apprehension coiling around Davies’ spine pulled itself another notch tighter. Morn’s fingers clenched and unclenched as she combed them through her hair: she might have been resisting an impulse to yank strands out by the fistful.
Abruptly the intercom crackled.
“All right, assholes,” Nick announced cheerfully. “On the bridge. Right away would be good. Right now would be better. It’s time for orders.”
Immediately Morn bobbed up from
her bunk as if she couldn’t afford to hesitate; as if she knew that once she hesitated she would lose her capacity for movement altogether. But the sight of her stricken gaze and her pallor wrung Davies’ heart. He caught her by the shoulder, turned her in the air to face him.
“I can tell him you’re still asleep. He’ll have to believe me—he doesn’t know how much cat I gave you. You can probably stay in here as long as you want.”
I can protect you that much.
She shook her head. “That would mean more waiting. I want to do something. Anything.” A rueful smile shaped her mouth for a moment. “I guess I’m more like you than I thought.”
He couldn’t think of a response. His own need for activity left no room for argument. In any case he wasn’t sure which one of them was protecting the other.
With his courage clenched in both hands, he pushed off toward the door.
He felt a downward drag as he moved—the light g of the asteroid, perhaps marginally augmented by gravitic fields from some of Deaner Beckmann’s experimental equipment. By the time he’d reached the door and keyed it open, his boots touched the deck.
Perfect. Just enough weight to confuse his zero-g training; not enough to let him move normally.
Fear spiked along his pulse as he floated in a flat arc toward the head of the companionway.
He was the first to arrive: only Nick and Angus were on the bridge. When he started down the treads, Nick flashed him a feral grin, full of black scars and threats; but Angus sat motionless—shoulders hunched, head bowed—as if he’d fallen asleep at his board.
Then Morn reached the companionway behind Davies.
Nick’s grin stretched wider. “You’re sane again,” he observed harshly. “I don’t know whether to regret that or enjoy it.”
“Enjoy it.” Morn’s tone was quiet and steady: she spoke from some distant place where Nick’s malice didn’t reach her. “You can’t hurt me when I’m out of my mind.”
Despite her plain weakness, her obvious vulnerability, she followed her son downward.
She may have been trying to defy Nick; but he didn’t react to it. He was on fire with a strange, personal ecstasy. The passion that heated his gaze and darkened his scars gave the impression that he’d achieved a state of exaltation in which he, too, couldn’t be reached.
Chaos and Order: The Gap Into Madness Page 37