“Yeah, that’s right,” I said. “She played a whole succession of these egomaniacal predatory vamps that everyone loved seeing humiliated in the end.”
“Yeah, I think I did some of those.” Jemal found another subject he could contribute to. “She sure was sexy.”
“But what did she do after that?” Alice asked.
We were stumped. What do you do after you’ve been the Greatest Star Who Ever Lived only now you’re not anymore? Go into retirement? For how many years? How many centuries?
“I haven’t heard about her in a long time,” Yuri said. “I wonder what she is doing.”
“Yeah,” Jemal agreed.
“That’s one thing Drake won’t have to worry about.” Archie looked at her coffee and we looked at her. There it was again.
“What’s that?” Steel asked, gently.
Archie didn’t return her gaze. “What to do,” she said, “He won’t have to worry about what to do anymore.”
We were quiet for just a moment. Then Archie obviously regretted bringing us back to the subject and said to Yuri, maybe a little too loud, “Anyway, I thought Dotie Foster was your ‘dream woman.’ What happened to her?”
“Jodie Foster,” Yuri corrected as he got up from the table. “That was before I discovered the ‘chick’ concept.”
The meal was breaking up. We all rose and started rinsing dishes, placing them in the sterilizer. The mundane domesticity was comforting.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” Archie said, evidently feeling it was her job to lift our spirits again, “what’s the ‘chick’ concept?”
I guess Yuri wanted to lift our spirits, too, because he jumped right back in: “You wouldn’t understand it. It’s too weird.”
“Sure I would,” Archie said, making a good effort to sound interested.
“No, no,” Yuri responded, “it’s cosmically weird. Multi-dimensionally weird. Weird like the mist-being from the Crab Nebula.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Sorry. Another movie. Star Trek 12: The Lost Generation.”
“What the hell is the ‘chick concept,’ you freaking skag-head?” Archie turned to me in exasperation. “I don’t know why I let him drag me into this stuff.”
Yuri laughed. “I’m actually still working on it. I need to do more research.”
“You’re making this up, aren’t you?”
“No, no! It was a real thing. Chicks only existed for maybe fifteen or twenty years around the middle of the twentieth century.”
“What was it, some kind of early genetics experiment?”
“Not genetics. Social Dynamics. Most chicks were named Connie. Connie Francis, Connie Stevens. I think there were some Darlenes, too, and, of course, my dream woman, Annette.”
Alice looked at me, “He’s gonna drag this out forever.”
“That’s the thing with Yuri,” Marcus put in, “If you let him go on long enough, he’ll tell you something so utterly esoteric that it will be completely unintelligible.”
“Hey,” Yuri leapt to his own defense, “I told you it was going to be weird.”
“Could you just boil it down to the basics?” Archie asked. “I’d like to get to bed before the universe degenerates into uniform entropy.”
“Okay, okay.” Yuri grinned like a coyote. “It’s really kind of interesting.”
“But weird,” Archie added.
“Very,” Yuri agreed. “Like I said, I’m still doing research, but it seems to be based on—” he looked around to see if we were hooked; we were, “it seems to be based on not having sex, but wanting to really, really badly.”
There was a pause while everyone looked at him like he was the mist-being from the Crab Nebula. Well, almost everyone. Alice didn’t seem all that interested, which I thought was strange, and of course I saw what he was driving at, but then, I’m older than most manufactured biospheres. Archie shook her head and said, “I’m going to bed. Anyone want to come with me?”
“Sure,” Jemal said.
Archie put her arm around Jemal’s waist and gave him a squeeze. “That’s what I like about you, Jemal. You don’t talk. You’re just a pretty face.”
Jemal laughed and squeezed her back. They went off down the passageway together.
We made the re-fueling station on the fourth day, my ‘days’ being earth-standard again. It had been a long time since I’d worked with a twenty-four hour day, but Steel’s med software had a very nice circadian adjustment program in it; I didn’t have any trouble.
Galactic Positron had built the station only fifty-million klicks out from Prime so they’d have lots of solar energy to run the colliders. It extended in an arc three-hundred-thousand klicks long. A baby. I hear the one around the Sun now goes literally around the Sun, but that’s down in the heart of civilization. They need a lot more fuel. Fifty-million klicks is nice and cozy when you’re talking about stars: closer than Mercury is to the Sun; we had to retract the habitation module. Anti-matter is relatively dangerous stuff, so core exchanges are fully automated. It went without a hitch. It did mean being weightless for about twelve hours, though, which gave Archie a chance to worry about Drake for a while.
My stress level started rising in earnest after we’d re-fueled. I knew that I only had seven days or so, ship’s time, to make up my mind about the operation. Three and a half days to accelerate, three and a half more to slow back down. Freewheeling time didn’t count; for one thing, it wasn’t ‘time’ at all. For another, I’d be busy.
So seven days. Then we’d be on Earth and either Steel would have a new member of an expedition to the most terrifying place humanity had ever known, or she’d have a great big security problem. And I wasn’t sure how she’d handle the second option.
After we got our new anti-matter core we swung north of the ecliptic to tack around Prime itself, using her gravity to get us pointed toward Altair, with the Sun between us and it and the center of the galaxy beyond. In the opposite direction, almost nine hundred light years away, Brainard’s Planet awaited my decision.
But before we could boost for earth we had to discharge our sad cargo. It wasn’t a problem with traffic control. Starships usually drop their waste before they boost. Traffic control didn’t know that our waste had once been part of the net—that we had to leave Drake to the fierce mercy of Prime in order to get through Earth Customs. They didn’t know that we were going to experience the permanent loss of an irreplaceable human perspective, a perspective that, under other circumstances, might have traveled the breadth of the galaxy, visited other galaxies, experienced the end of time. They didn’t know we were about to commit the first murder in over a millennium.
We weren’t equipped for it. I mean, we had the hardware to do the job; it was a simple mag-rail launch of Drake’s pod. What we didn’t have was a common experience to call on, a ritual, a mode of being. I was the only one there who had ever lost anyone close, and that had been centuries and centuries ago. We all gathered in the launch bay, almost by instinct, or maybe curiosity, or perhaps a primal need for physical proximity to a willed act of diminution of the tribe. We couldn’t see Drake. His pod was once again swathed in the thermal covering that had protected it on Vesper, the idea being that once the temperature rose high enough to burn through the blanket, Drake and the pod would flash into plasma almost instantly. It seemed the best way.
The launch bay wasn’t small, but we all seemed to crowd together anyway. Steel was at the launch panel and would be the one to actually execute the maneuver. Archie was checking read-outs on a hand-held display. The rest of us stood mutely, wondering what we were observing.
“He’s asleep?” Steel asked Archie.
“Unconscious,” Archie replied. “He won’t feel anything.”
Steel took a deep breath. We were all watching her, but she was staring at Drake’s pod, perhaps taking one last chance to will him back to health. She touched a green light on the panel and it turned red as the inner hatch opened to the m
ag-rail. Drake lowered gently into the rail tube and rested there for a moment before the hatch closed and the light on the panel turned back to green. We looked for something to say. Steel touched an amber light and we could hear the compressor evacuating the tube; the light turned to green when the compressor stopped. Another green light turned red as Steel opened the outer hatch. Although we couldn’t see it, we knew the end of Drake’s pod was now bathed in the blinding glare of Prime’s unfiltered light. It made him seem farther from us. Did it make him seem closer to the cosmos? I don’t know.
Steel’s finger hovered over the launch initiator. She spoke, and her voice was as clear and beautiful as I had ever heard it: “Let the ship’s log show that on July thirty-first, in the year thirty-nine hundred ninety-seven, at twenty-two-oh-one Greenwich Mean Time, corrected, ship’s exobiologist Drake was placed in the launch tube of the starship Lightdancer—” her voice faltered for just a moment, “—and launched into space.” She touched the initiator and we felt a muted thump. The mag-rail kicked Drake into free orbit, an orbit that would end at Prime’s surface, only he would never make it that far. “He was eight-hundred seventy-one years old.”
What else was there to say? We stared at the tube hatch, or maybe the bulkhead or the bottom of our souls. We searched but found nothing. Steel turned to me and said, “Mohandas, I’d like to see you in my quarters,” and she strode out of the bay. I looked around at everyone else, but they offered no answers, so I followed Steel down the passageway.
“Tell me about your wife,” she said to me, her features shadowed. Light from another room, her galley, maybe, spilled through an archway behind her, filtering through colored glass sculptures that floated on shelves. Pools of color caressed her fur. She sat with her knees and ankles together, her elbows on her thighs, her chin pressed into her fists. Her eyes weren’t on me. They were still looking at Drake.
“What do you want to know?” I asked, thinking: ‘How is this going to cleanse your hands?’
“Everything,” she replied, sitting very still. Then she returned to herself, made herself relax a little, not much. “How you met, how you—Where did you get married?” Her eyes sought mine and I knew what she really wanted to ask, but I answered what she had asked.
“Syrtis. On Mars.”
“Was it in a church?” The word sounded strange coming from her lips. Another ancient word.
“A Hindu temple. My father ...”
“Yes. You had a father.” She looked back at Drake.
“Yes.” I wanted to help her. As angry as I was with her, I wanted to love her, to heal her. To own her.
“Were there a lot of people there?” She had started to rock gently. She was hugging her knees now.
“A lot of people. Both our—our families,” another ancient word, “our friends. Their families. Their friends.” I watched the loneliest woman I had ever seen. “No one could believe we were actually going through with it. I guess our fights were pretty legendary.”
“What did you fight about?”
“Our work. How my work interfered with hers, actually. She was usually right.”
She rocked.
“Did you like to fight?” she asked, her voice getting smaller.
“Yes, I suppose we did.” I wanted to sit next to her, but I didn’t know if I was supposed to. “I guess we liked to do everything, as long as it was us doing it.”
“Where did you go after—you know, for your—what did they call it?”
“Our honeymoon?”
“Yes.” She had hugged her legs into her chest. Her chin was on her knees.
I sat across from her so I could look into her eyes. I perched on the edge of the seat so I could be closer to her. I rested my elbows on my knees, with my hands out in case she wanted to hold them. “We went to one of the shepherd moons. I forget which one.”
“Around Saturn?” Pools of tears trembled in her eyes.
“Yes. The one they made the resort out of. Have you been there?”
“No.”
“They kicked its orbit about five degrees out of the plane of the rings. You swing above the rings for half an orbit, then down through them and you’re underneath for the other half. It’s very beautiful.”
She kept looking at Drake. And rocking. Rocking. “Was she beautiful?”
I took a chance and put my hand under her chin. I brought her head up so she was looking at me. “As beautiful as you are,” I said.
“Captain?” Marcus’ voice came over the intercom.
“Yes?” Steel replied.
“The pod is gone. We tracked it until it vaporized. It was a good burn. You told me to let you know.”
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.” She looked at me again. Her chin started to tremble and the tears spilled over her eyelashes and ran down her cheeks. I put my hand on her shoulder and she fell apart into wracking, convulsing sobs. Standing, I swept her into my arms and crushed her to my chest. She hugged my neck and buried her face in the pit of my shoulder while she cried and cried and cried until the universe refused to end and she was still there, holding me, being held by me, living in the present.
After some time her breathing steadied but she kept her face buried in my shoulder. A little later she got braver and looked up at me. She said, “I must look awful.”
“No, no,” I replied, “you look great with snot running down your face. Most people couldn’t pull it off, but you really do.”
She giggled, which, owing to the viscous condition of her nasal passages at the time, turned into kind of a snort, which made her laugh, which made her start to cry again. I stood there rocking her gently back and forth for a time—a long time, maybe.
A while later she said, “I must be getting heavy.”
“No, not really. Well, maybe. Yeah, I guess you are.”
She laughed again. “You can put me down if you want.” She continued to hug my neck.
“Where?” I asked, and kept rocking her for a while.
Then she said, “My bed’s in there.”
I looked where she nodded. She still couldn’t let go of me long enough to point. I walked through the archway, and the lights came up softly as we entered the room. I started to put her down on the bed.
“Don’t let go of me,” she said.
“All right.” I lay down beside her, my arms still enclosing her, her knees curled up and her head on my chest.
“I need to blow my nose.”
I looked around.
“There are tissues over there.” She nodded again.
I saw them beside the bed and handed her one. She blew and said, “More.” I handed her a few. She blew again, wiped her eyes and her face, and curled up against me, maybe tighter than before.
We lay a long time like that. She would occasionally shudder, and sometimes she would cry some more, then she would be still. A long time later she asked me, “How long were you married?”
I knew what she was leading up to, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go there, but I said, softly, “A long time.” I breathed. “Over three hundred years.”
We both breathed for a while.
“Were you happy together?”
“Yes,” I said, hoping I was telling the truth, and, upon reflection, knowing that I was.
Then: “You have a strong heart.”
“What?” I lifted my head.
“I can hear it beating.” And then she started to cry again, but not for as long this time.
Then, a little later, she said, “How did she—How did—” We had reached where she needed to be, and, I guess, where I needed to be, too. But I checked anyway:
“On Valhala?” And she nodded. So I looked in my heart for where I kept that story and wondered if I could take it out. I started, because I needed to, but I didn’t know how far I would get.
“We’d always re-booted together. Just ... to make sure that, that nothing happened, you know, to separate us.”
“What if one of you got sick?”
&nb
sp; “We were pretty lucky. Both of us had been born and raised on Mars”—and I thought, what an odd phrase, ‘born and raised’—“so we missed out on a lot of the stuff that was going around Earth at the time. Even back then the net kept you pretty healthy. We never were involved in any life-threatening accidents. I suppose we should have been—the line of work we were in.”
I was quiet for a while, and Steel was content to wait. Then: “It was a big deal, getting to go out to Barnard’s Star back then. Any of the early projects. We were going to save the world, and I guess we did. Nobody knew if the projects were going to pay off. They were so incredibly expensive. I guess they completely re-defined the term, ‘risk capital.’ ” I could feel my heart tightening as I got closer. “Of course, all the corps were risking was capital. We were the ones taking the real risks.”
“What happened ... to your wife?” I could tell she didn’t want to make me go there if I didn’t want to, but she needed me to. And I think she could tell that I needed to as well.
I breathed deeply and tried to balance myself. “She just ... got old and faded away. Congestive heart failure complicated by pneumonia. But it could have been anything. She just got old.”
“Why?”
I breathed again, but the anger was dagger sharp and bright as the taste of blood. I had refreshed it each time I had re-booted since then. “It was kind of a test case,” I said. “The corps got cold feet when the project fell behind schedule so they ... pulled out.”
“Out of what?”
“Out of Valhala. Out of the entire Barnard’s Star system. They just cut us off. They got scared that the Valhala project wasn’t going to show a profit so they cut and run.”
“So you lost your jobs?”
I allowed myself a sardonic smile. “We lost much more than that. We’d all put our fortunes into the Valhala Corporation. There wasn’t any use for money on Valhala. There wasn’t anything to spend it on, just us, so the corp set up a fund for us back in the System. When they declared bankruptcy, the fund was frozen.”
When I didn’t continue she prompted me: “Well, you said there was nothing to spend money on—”
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