Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  But something had gone wrong; word of her plan had gotten to John’s sister, Louise, and Louise had called the cops. Steel had to flee or be tried for heresy. She then enlisted Archie and Drake to get the children and follow her. But Jacob had been in an accident and they discovered that the children couldn’t re-boot. And here we were, still trying to pick up the pieces.

  I don’t know if I could understand everything, but I understood a great deal more than I had: the lack of sex, for instance, between Steel and me. I didn’t even have to ask her now. I knew. She hadn’t had sex since the last time she’d been on Eden. Since the last time she’d had it with John Cheatham. She’d denied herself to be true to him, to her vows.

  Only now she had been released from her vows, and I was the one who had to tell her. How was I going to do that? I had no idea. I looked at the floor as I said, “Thank you. Thank you for telling me—for trusting me with ... Okay. Okay, now I have something I have to tell you and I ... I don’t ... Okay ...”

  I turned to face her and she looked into my eyes and I could see that she didn’t know. I could see that she thought she was still married, that she couldn’t even conceive of any other state of things. Even after losing Jacob, even after losing Drake, even after living on Eden, it was just too alien: utterly beyond the realm of possibility.

  I started again, “Okay, I think what probably happened was that ... that Louise ...” I faltered.

  “Yes?” she asked, still not knowing.

  “Louise, I think, probably was going to go to the police and John ... I think John tried to stop her.”

  “Oh, no! Do we need to—” she started.

  “Wait. Wait, just ... she didn’t get to them—”

  “Did John stop her? What—”

  “Please, just let me ... let me ...”

  “What happened? I know what Louise is capable of. Mo, if we need to—”

  “Captain, Steel, please, let me tell this. Please.” I thought for a moment. “Do you remember those two sounds we heard? A couple of hours ago? Those two ... pops that reverberated while we were talking with Alice and Archie here in the room?”

  She nodded, “Yes. I remember. What—”

  “That was ... I think John tried to talk her out of going and he couldn’t and the first pop was John ... They were gun shots. The pops. The first was when John ... shot, killed Louise. He shot her. In the chest and ... and she, she died. And I think, then, that John couldn’t, couldn’t face ... I think he just couldn’t take it anymore.” I looked into Steel’s eyes. She still didn’t know. “He’d killed his sister, you see? He just couldn’t ... the second sound, the second gunshot was John ... He—I’m so sorry, Captain—”

  “What? I don’t understand.”

  She still didn’t know. She wasn’t taking it in at all. “Steel, Steel, John shot himself. He killed himself. The second sound was John shooting himself. He’s ... he’s gone. He’s gone.”

  “But ... but ... is he okay? Is he—”

  “Captain. Captain, he’s gone. The sheriff told me that John killed Louise and then took his own life. He’s gone. Your ... your husband is, is ...” None of the old religious descriptions seemed right to me, somehow. I couldn’t use them. I fell back on the only language I had. “His perspective is lost to us. We don’t have him anymore. You’re not ... you’re not married anymore. Captain?” I searched her face. “Steel?”

  At that moment her eyes broke. One instant they still belonged to John Cheatham and the next they didn’t belong to anyone, not even herself. They were broken eyes, unable to see, unable to be in the world at all: shattered like glass on pavement.

  She sat inert, silent, still, but falling. I couldn’t catch her; I couldn’t do anything but watch her fall. She looked at a spot on the wall, or through it, or at nothing and said, “We have to ... we have to tell Alice.” She looked back at me. She hadn’t seen her husband in over a decade of her time but she had been married to him nonetheless. “Would you—I think I need to ... would you mind telling ... I need ... I need to be alone for a little while. Could you tell Alice? I’m sorry, is that too much to ... I don’t know what to ... I just need a little time—”

  “Yeah, I’ll tell her,” I said. “I’ll tell her. You just ... try to ... I’m sorry, Steel. Estelle, I mean—”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “I’m sorry. I—”

  “It’s all right. Just ... just don’t ...”

  I watched her fall. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll be back in a little while.” And fall. And fall and fall and fall. I let myself out of our room.

  Part VI

  In Transit

  Chapter 27

  I didn’t know what to tell Alice. I couldn’t tell her the truth, not the whole truth. I didn’t want her to feel responsible in any way. She wasn’t, I knew, but I was afraid she’d blame herself somehow: for upsetting her father or for coming back to see him, and I knew that her returning was probably the best thing that had happened to John Cheatham since Steel had left him. Alice and Archie were asleep; as I stood outside their door I thought maybe I should just let them sleep and tell them in the morning, but it seemed like Alice had the right to know.

  Archie responded to my knock, and the three of us sat on their bed. As gently as I could, I told Alice that her father was gone, but I didn’t mention Louise at all. I didn’t mention the popping sounds. When she asked me what had happened—I lied to her. I hope I lied well. I told her simply that his heart had been weak for a long time and it had finally given out. I said how fortunate it was that she had been able to get back in time to see him—to see him before he passed away. I told her how clear it was to me that he loved her, that it meant everything to him that she had come back.

  She didn’t question me. She didn’t doubt. Her reaction was immediate and pure. A sad, small sound started deep within her, her chest convulsed and tears poured down her face. She collapsed against me, her sadness filling her and flooding out of her. I held her and Archie moved in and held her, too. Alice snuggled into both of us and cried and cried.

  I spent most of the night with her and Archie. Archie and I made a nest of our bodies with Alice curled up in the middle. Whenever one of us moved Alice would grab us and pull us back around her. Eventually she exhausted herself and fell asleep.

  In the small of the morning I went back to my own room. It was dark and Steel lay in bed, still and quiet. I got in beside her and could tell she wasn’t asleep, but she made no overture to me, no movement or sound. I didn’t know what to say to her anyway, so I let her alone and tried to get some sleep myself.

  We left Nazareth early in the morning, before anyone else was up. I didn’t want Alice to hear any news about her father or her aunt. Steel and I didn’t talk much as we packed in the room, but I did tell her how I had explained John’s death to her daughter and she seemed to accept my handling of it. I don’t know if she got any sleep at all.

  On our way out of town we passed the schoolyard where I had first seen the children. It was empty, but I could see small footprints in the dust; I remembered the echoes of their laughter. We continued through town, into the narrow slot and up the carved stairs. Emerging from the soft rose light of that stone womb into the metallic brightness of the desert morning seemed more spiritual than physical, more psychological than spiritual: painful, abrupt, silent, terrifying.

  Conversation was sparse and laconic as we drove across the rock. I left the road and turned the Buckymobile northeast, angling toward the Buddhist shrine at the base of the escarpment. I wasn’t worried about getting lost; Marcus was tracking us from the Lightdancer every inch of the way.

  We left our car in a shallow gulch out of sight of the shrine trail and hiked the last few klicks. The shrine itself, my entrance into Eden’s culture, was unchanged. Serene painted eyes still stared benignly at the cardinal points of the compass. Prayer flags still fluttered in the wind, offering their silent supplication. Would the Buddha they spoke to intercede fo
r John Cheatham, for Louise? Even though they had prayed to a different being? Did those questions have any meaning at all?

  Above the shrine we found our space suits. Putting them on was comforting and familiar, but donning the helmets and sealing them was another leaving. We were insulated from Eden’s ecosystem now, as alien technologically as we were spiritually. We said goodbye to Alice’s home one more time.

  Then cliffs and talus and scree and cliffs. Powered jumars lifted us up colossal walls of rock: into the future, into the past. On the third night we stayed at the hut where Archie lost her arm. The next day we jumared past the ledge where Steel and Alice saved me from freezing. It was a bright, sunny morning; I barely recognized it.

  As we ascended into the heavens I thought about John Cheatham’s brief, ruined life. Steel’s husband. Our captain was a widow now, as I was a widower. I knew we shared a crime. Both of us had betrayed the one we loved. I didn’t want to minimize what I had done, I don’t think I did, but ... but when I remembered John’s face as he said goodbye to Alice, to his daughter, I thought ... I thought—how? How could anyone take a person’s children? How could Steel contemplate such an act? How could she carry it out? If she had ever loved John Cheatham as I had loved my wife ...

  Twelve centuries ago, on Valhalla, I was with her when she—when she—I was in the room with her. It hadn’t been easy to get to her. There had been fighting in First Landing. The newbies had taken the corporate offices and taken control of the spaceport, but I’d told them she was ill, she was dying, maybe, and they let me hop a shuttle so I could fly halfway around the planet to be with her. I got to her a few days before she left me forever. We had those few days.

  Through the window in her hospital room we could see the forests she had started. She was so small. Lying in the bed she didn’t look like she weighed enough to keep it from floating away. Her hair had turned white, but her eyes still mirrored my soul. She was glad I’d re-booted early. She thought the troubles would be resolved before I needed the treatment again. I told her I didn’t want to re-boot again, that I never would. She told me not to be silly. There was so much work left to do, she said, so many stars to visit, so many planets to find, to shape, so many homes to make. We’d never had children but she felt that every newbie on Valhalla—if not every newbie everywhere—was our personal responsibility. All I could tell her was that I loved her. I laid my head on her breast and said, “I love you, I love you,” over and over again. As I lay there holding her, I found myself wanting everything to stop, just ... stop. I wanted time to cease being time and become something else, something softer, more merciful. I prayed for it to stop, to just leave me there with her and her with me. My soul ached and screamed and begged for it to stop but it wouldn’t stop and I knew I had one other thing I had to tell her. I had to tell her why I had ’booted without her, I had to explain to her, had to ask her to, to forgive me ... but I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I—I didn’t. I couldn’t.

  She tired and needed to sleep. I held her hand for a long time but eventually I fell asleep, too, in the chair beside her bed. A nurse woke me to tell me she was gone. She was gone and there was nothing I could do to bring her back.

  I’ve never forgiven myself for falling asleep. Of all my failings, shortcomings, weaknesses, losing those last hours with her is what costs me the most.

  I wondered if Steel could forgive herself. I wondered if she felt she’d done anything wrong.

  She dealt with John’s passing much differently than Alice did. It was heartwarming and heartbreaking to watch. Alice was like a young willow: bending to the ground whenever the winds of grieving buffeted her, but springing back as soon as they had passed. Steel was more like an old oak, standing straight and tall against the storm. But what could bend in Alice broke in Steel; Steel would live with the scars much longer.

  What was I going to do about Alice? None of this was her doing and our problem hadn’t changed: Alice was still unable to re-boot. I tried not to treat her any differently, but I’m not sure how well I did. Being confronted with the unyielding finality of her father’s cessation—of her aunt’s— had changed me, had reminded me of the old days. Mortality was with me now. It never left my side.

  Still, we made it to the top. Finding the crate at the bottom of the rill on that rocky plain above the world was like coming home. Under the black, star-filled sky that simple piece of fortieth century technology suggested that our time in the culture of Eden had been imagined. As we prepared to be hooked into space, to be captured by an orbiting starship, the experience of Eden seemed so dissonant, so strange and removed, it became hard to believe that we had gone through it. But we had changed Eden by our visit and it had changed us.

  I lost myself in the work at hand. We would leave Eden as we had left Vesper, only this time none of it was improvised. Every element had been tested and used before. One end of the crate detached and became a tiny chariot, just big enough for the four of us to clamp onto. A small, liquid-fueled rocket motor—primitive but reliable—would boost us the few meters we needed to meet the skyhook and let us hover there until the hook grabbed us and threw us into the void. Tamika would cut in the graviton impellers and scoot out to pick us up and the planet of Eden, the religions of Eden, the children, love and death of Eden would be in our past.

  Brainard’s Planet was still in our future.

  The crew welcomed us back aboard—four people who were subtly and profoundly different than those who had left the ship a few weeks earlier. They wanted to reconnect with us, to know what we had been through. It was odd not wanting to tell them. It wasn’t that we wanted to keep it secret, and we didn’t. We told them the basic facts, the pertinent ones, anyway: we had found Alice’s father; he had passed away before we left. But the deeper things—the fear, the pain ... the anger ... I didn’t want to share any of that with them, or burden them with it, perhaps. They regarded us quizzically, but with compassion, respect. Patience, overall. We knew each other in ways the Edenites never could. We knew we could never really be separated, and we had all the time in the world to bridge any distance that had opened between us.

  But we had more immediate problems. Marcus asked us to convene in the common room after we had recovered from our ascent. We needed to decide where we were going next, and Marcus had other news for us as well. As we sat around the table he spoke first to Steel:

  “While you were incommunicado on the surface Jean-Léon bulleted me from Neuschwanstein. He wanted to talk with you but I convinced him you were unavailable.”

  “Yes?” Steel responded. “What did he want?” Loss and grief had eroded her voice, leaving it hollow and tired. Archie looked tired, too. Of the four of us who had visited Eden, only Alice seemed stronger somehow, or perhaps just more substantial.

  Marcus was measured and concise, but his news was rather disturbing: “Krupp has finished re-booting. He’s determined to find out where we are and where we’re going.”

  Krupp. Wonderful. I’d almost forgotten about Krupp. I thought I’d finally gotten Steel to fill me in on everything and then this super-juiced maniac comes back into the picture. It was too much. I had to speak. “Who is this guy?” I asked. “I mean, I never really got to meet him before he threw me off a bridge. Does everybody know him except me?”

  Steel sighed wearily and looked at the tabletop. “No, Mo. No one really knows Krupp except me.” Alice looked at her m– her m– looked at Steel and shook her head in tired exasperation. She wanted to speak but she didn’t. Steel raised her head and found my eyes, “Krupp is my problem, not yours. It’s a syndicate matter. I’m afraid that’s all I am at liberty to say on the subject.”

  My reply was not as temperate as I would have liked. “Well that’s just freaking great,” I yelled. I slapped my palms on the tabletop, stood up. “What the hell does a person have to do to get into the inner sanctum around here?”

  Marcus gestured to me, “Please, sit down, Mo—”

  “Why?” I said, “Why shou
ld I sit down? This guy beats me up, rips off my, my—” I turned to Steel, “Do you even know what he took from me?”

  Steel looked alarmed. “What?” she asked.

  I didn’t want to say it, not in front of the crew. I didn’t want to upset them. I didn’t want them to worry. I hadn’t told anyone about it except Archie. It’s funny and painful how fragile we feel ourselves to be even in this age of immortality. The thing that’s the hardest to hang onto is the past. We’ve become accustomed to floating free in the river of time, to watching the centuries pass by us in an endless dance, but we still seek an anchor, some structure to inform us of who we are, who we’ve become, who we used to be. The number of times I’d held that little meteorite, thumbed its pitted texture, was beyond counting: remembering my childhood, my family, my earliest home. I’d had it when I’d taken my degree in architecture. I’d had it when I got married, but I didn’t have it anymore. What Krupp had torn away was a souvenir, a trinket, but it had been me.

  Archie finally said what I could not, “Mo had his first talisman mounted on his shoulder. When he was injured, the talisman was lost.” She spoke in a quiet, calm voice, but the effect her words had was immediate and profound.