The screen is still empty. “Lievering? He shows no sign of it.” She shudders. “I hope not.”
“Or all, of course; you could have all,” Soraya says calmly. What other people might do doesn’t shock her, only what she might; she’s admitted it. In the old days yes, that was how the harem was made to work. “I say—you’ll have none.”
“Or all and none.” As she’s always done. Though she hasn’t felt like it since coming aboard, owing to the same medication provided women astronauts, which has stopped her menses as well. What the men have been administered she doesn’t know, though Tom has complained the coffee tastes like his old boarding-school slosh, in those days rumored to be doctored with saltpeter obtained at the nearby naval base. She can imagine him as a partner, though she has never let her mind run that way—toward what might turn out to be incestuous heat. But could she give up, even if he would, his company as it always has been, the quirky, cocky, asexual life-monitor ever at her elbow? Who knows everything about the world and himself—except that he’s not a reformer but an adventurer?
As for Mulenberg, he’s diagnosed his position with her correctly. He counts just little enough so that she might begin to be tender with him. Lievering moves her most. Of him she is sincerely afraid. He has the Indian sign on her, of her own youth. While over his own once crippled attraction there hangs now the shadowy in hoc signo of some spiritual chase whose stigmata might suddenly boil in his palm.
This leaves Mole, whom Soraya hasn’t mentioned. Plainly no victim of saltpeter, his open, bee-stung admiration makes her bridle—and smile. He already has a solemnity which the journalist in her recognizes, encountered in both the civilized and uncivilized corners of the world, and as often in broken men and women as in great ones. His virtue is not going to be separable from his intelligence.
All and none, that’s my trouble. Once, in Paraguay, she’d been taken by a French ornithologist to see a rare and celebrated bird-courting. The great males, naively lifting and lowering their seven-league wings for permission, picking up feet red-hot from inner burning, danced closer until rebuffed. The females, tall, angular specimens with faces as black as her own—even she saw the resemblance surmising that the laughing Frenchman had brought her for this purpose—stood averted, each in the hereditary sullenness. Then each had pounced. There had been more than enough males. There was no doubt which of the genders was the more prurient. She hadn’t spent the night with the ornithologist. Grinning mightily to herself the next morning, she’d sent him a bouquet.
She got up now and walked the Jacuzzi tub’s rim, her bare feet cuddling metal lukewarm as a rug. To her, one of the pleasures of this vehicle is its varied surfaces, and above all the gradations of motion provided her animal restlessness, those shiftings, in her since puberty, which Vivie had counseled were her “natural sex-nerves.” She is savoring her diet of gravities and atmospheres the way a recruit to radicalism might relish the new dogmas. The very suit-changes they must make seem to her bracing, like what one might do for sport. What she had known of flying now seems to her naïve and all ego—the monocycle thrill of piloting her small plane, or the soaring of the glider which hung over the earth like a soliloquy. The ordinary travel she did so much of down below now seems to her indiscriminate. Movement here is in phalanx, and within the thrill of fixed boundaries. She won’t describe this to Tom, who would see fascism in it. For what the vehicle offers them all is that wholeness of sensation which is geared not only to motion but to containment. So will the habitat.
Soraya’s still watching the screen. “It can’t be over yet.”
“What?”
“That repair. It shouldn’t be.”
EVA—you’ve flown, why don’t you train for it, Tom said, needling her, and like most of his sort equating any “air” activity with another. As well as mistaking this for why she had come.
For glory, Mulenberg, entering the Courier at her side, had said, flushed with the humility which made her cruel to him. You’re going for glory. At once she had stripped off one of the artificial roses flickering in the wind at the hangar’s doorside and had thrust it from her gloved hand to his.
Lievering has followed no one. He’s here as usual via the pure accident of himself. Seated next to him in the galley their first week out, she trembled, though the palm of the hand he ate with was unmarked. The curl of his lip, no longer so godly, still has no scorn in it. But now that he no longer stammers one sees that the defect had rendered pitiable a man who is really to be feared. He is one of those in whose presence people remember their own inner scourges. Women have to stop somewhere, he’d said—and here she is. I don’t ever want to stop, she’d cried, and had run from him straight toward the great arched categories she hoped to evade. We make nets of language but the blood always comes through, he’d warned. But he never really needed language. Wherever he is, the blood of the world comes through to him. For sure, one will never know which is character in him, and which experience. He is one of those rare ones in whom these are the same. When he rose from the table, Mole got up and followed him.
She’s here to leave her experience behind, to break through into ordinary life and maybe stay. By will a member of Mole’s aerospace generation, she sees no oddity in the extreme setting she’s chosen. As what her world sleazily calls a celebrity, she has no hope of being an ordinary person, or not until old age, when all have that possibility. Yet all ordinary lives need not be the same. She’s so muscularly happy here; mayn’t she be acting from instinct—though this, too, Tom would deny. Nowadays, as he often sighs, we act bodily for such intellectual reasons; it’s the late-century’s neo-primitive curse. Even the dopes are doing it. He’d like to have lived in one of those Restoration comedies where as a matter of course everyone had his or her shark-teeth out for satisfaction. If you and I can’t do that, Veronica, it’s because we share the classically poor judgment of those who look ahead.
So for years they’ve immobilized each other. As in their statutory marriage.
Yet she’s had two of those fake-legal affairs. Careful, Veronica. Don’t blame the mens.
She’s tired of her own secrets. As with the manuscript, she’s trying to dispose of them. For a long while after Mulenberg she’d found herself chaste, the fever stopped, along with the excitement which used to come from repetitive sexual action secretly pursued. Knocking about Paris she had often observed certain women, beauties or jolies laides, not all of them with many lovers but all with some, suddenly pull up short into a kind of false middle age. Since they were also types who could do nothing without style, they externalized their new state, clipping their skulls close in what was more than chic, strutting the effigy bone structure as less vulgar for them now than any further striving toward the proud-flesh of youth. Though not homosexual themselves, they often gravitated to the company of the gay, inviting gently appreciative male souls to tea at the blue hour formerly devoted to love, and later joining those mixed crowds of any sex who knew how to waste the white, sleepless hours by turning them into scarecrow night. Widows of the hormone, such women are. She’s still too young for it.
Before she embarked, her most notable public admirer came to wish her well and regret her leaving. He knows the secret which includes all of the others, that she suffers from a lack of recognition by herself, over the work done. She still does those articles in which she invades an environment, or a matter of principle, abused or eccentric ones preferable, with her hypertensive eye—and still has her claque for it, thanks to which she’s known in her nation and even beyond, if in the shallows of the name and the photograph.
What she’d wanted was to be a good enough artist so that when she chose she could afford to confuse the power of the adoration with the power of the work—a disease deadly when chronic, but if not, often supportive to the sufferer, and in the case of a supreme gift now and then producing, like a self-inoculation, further good work. “Ah, but you’re going off,” he says shrewdly. “People of that sort do not.�
� They do not adventure but imagine, and record from the star-strewn casement only. Yet he doesn’t want her to be ordinary—for he’s written about her; it would reflect on him. It was he who years ago said of her: “The language of nihilism—and full of hope.” He is sure she will admire herself again. Nuh, she answered. “That’s what they say to children.” He laid his gouty, puffed hand against her cheek. “Yes.” She took him to her door, now an anonymity in a tower always royal with sun and overlooking no small buildings, and said good-bye without further talk. He knows what’s happened to her; she’s not the first. The nihilism is what has gone, over the far hills, to wait for the next contender. She has been left with the hope.
“Allah—” Soraya says, still watching the screen, “bismillah. There is Mole.”
Extraordinary that they can tell it is he. Thanks to living so close they have triumphed over uniforms; in spite of all, they can differentiate. Mulenberg is Size, Lievering Grace, Tom alas Clumsy, without reflexes he will trust. And here is Mole, floating diagonally across the screen, at the end of two thick, corrugated tubings which attach to his shoulder and must connect to the vehicle somewhere off-screen. He is no longer awkward, now daring, now tentative. Now he stops peering toward the vehicular surface and floats straight at them, goggles wide. Soraya draws in her breath. “S-fffff. They should not let him.” Mole is modern, insolent. He’s the tester, not yet nameable. He is judging space.
Now he, too, is gone.
The Hygiene Unit is itself again. Curtainless, without a porthole to the crammed stars; it’s once again part of a mechanism skimming these bright wastes. The rocket probe with phallic nose has long since been dropped behind. A universe’s curve may or may not be construed as uterine. But they are in the belly of the Courier, as Soraya’s fetus is in hers; there’s nothing further of the erotic here. To look for it would be—unproductive. Would mean that we are dragging our old home with us toward an absolute, in whose focus no dream can apply. No voyage other than that of the measurer, measuring.
“Lost.” Soraya’s dove-voice cracks on it.
“Him? Mole? No, he’s just—”
“We all.”
“What do you mean?”
“Wert thinks it.”
“Did he say?”
“Not with the tongue.” Soraya’s trying to hide her grimace. She bends toward her belly, an arm sliding forward alongside, on the rim of the Jacuzzi. She wants the impossible, to lay her face on where the child is. “I mind for him.”
Veronica runs round the side of the tub to kneel in front of her. “Soraya. Look up. Don’t worry; they’ll find us. Mission Control. The computers will. You know that.” It doesn’t hit her as strange that she should be reassuring a person trained to them. Confidence flows where it can. “Come on, duck.” She lays her long palm on the belly, almost covering it. “The universe is too small, nuh, for him to be lost.” She’s talking like Vivie did to her when, waking in the dark hole of the midnight cot, the coifed head appeared over her, its earrings shaking, medicine rattles against all giants. Come, duck, what you need’s some hot milk.
“Soraya, honey.” She smooths the outstretched arms, so much shorter than her own. “Tell me again, nuh? How that baby going to be born, that lab we’re taking him to. Like how they going to manage it? How you?”
Soraya half raises up. Not that the two of them aren’t grown women severe on the ways of the world, but now they tap a complicity risen up in them. “Come on, hon duck. You compute it for me. Compute, poot. You know what a pootie is, that li’l sound a baby makes in his didie?” Gibberish such as the island women talked, severe women, too, in other circumstances—which popped out of Vivie to disprove her daytime counsel; No woman a baby-style woman just from she born to it.
“Raise up, Soraya.”
Where’s that stern voice coming from? Veronica stands as if she, too, doesn’t know, her neck stiff and high. Soraya raises up as if she’s already on that birth table.
“It will be like—I am to be in restraint. Those straps. Like in any hospital. But inside them—I will float. I will push, but not against. Nothing will drag at me. It will be all my push. And he will push, too, but so light—” Her arms lift, undulating. “Even they say the pain will float. They care for the research, not for me. But the doctors say I myself have not much push; some of the muscles are cut. And the abdominals, too.” The words issue odd and strict from between those dancing arms. “The pain, psssh—those men with their pencils. But this way the baby they say will cry only for the air. When he cries.” Her face is all delight. Then she sighs. “I will tell you something. I am three years older than I say.” She gives a little shrug. “Only the other Soraya knows. And Fateh.” She rolls her eyes. “No mens.”
Veronica scratches her head, her finger delicate down its center. “I’ll tell you. I’m two and a half years younger. Than my supposed legal. I wasn’t ten when I started menstruating, and just about to start a fancy school. My stepmother was ashamed for me, especially with the whites. We were in Ottawa by then. She said those wishy-washy English didn’t start till they were fourteen. And I was grades ahead in my classwork anyway—so she just switched me. Daddy never knew.”
They face each other, shoulders hunched. The giggles come by fits and starts, then louder and louder, one spell after another until they’re exhausted, when Soraya gives a shout. “And then—they will catch him. The boy. Maybe for a minute he will float, too, out, out, but quick they will catch him, in a net. Like a mosquito.”
“Little mens.” Veronica whispers it.
Turning as one, they check the screen. Empty. Then a boot comes on, in close-up. Another boot joins it. They hang there, their stubby bulldog fronts forward. Impossible to say whether they’re a pair or belong to space-walkers halted side by side. Both women hug their breasts, feeling their nudity. Then the boots are snatched up and away.
“Must be no small repair.” Veronica cocks her head. “Hey, listen.” A siren. Once. Twice. And again. “Is that the all-clear?”
“Or the emergency?”
Can you believe it? They’ve both forgotten which is which. “Told us so many times, too,” Veronica says between her teeth. “Beginning with that motel.”
The humdrum word hits like a pebble slung at a barred window. They’re silent.
“This laughing we make together—” Soraya says. “The name for it?”
“Giggling.”
“You think—we do it too much?”
“No,” Veronica says. “All considered.”
When the screen springs to radiant life the shiny walls dapple with it.
ON COURSE
The video wouldn’t lie. It’s not used to it. Or not in such short syllables.
All clear, Soraya whispers to her belly. La la. Yo-yo. You and I know it has to be. All clear for you and me. There—didn’t he move? Or is it the digestion only? When it happens you won’t have to ask, Frank the medic said—he’ll give a kick that’ll send you to kingdom come.
She sees that Veronica, halfway across the Hygiene Unit, is no longer squatting in her usual style—head lax between her piston knees, or lying full length along the pool’s rim. She’s standing up, her eyes like one of the pair of onyx statuettes originally plundered from the site of the Great Oasis at Gharga, which Bakh had hidden in his walled Teheran garden. The museum, Bakh had chortled, was begging the pair back on a promise to return them ceremonially to Khartoum, where until A.D. 400 or so, they had stood in a temple marking the confluence of the Blue Nile and the White. Which promise neither party had expected to be kept.
Both women are dreaming.
“Veronica—what are you looking at.”
“I’m watching birds.”
“Birds? Here—you are watching birds?” But they are both tolerant.
“Three of them. Maybe four. All dancing.”
“There’s a bird in my belly. Come feel.” She’s not a video; she’s lying. She wants her fetus constantly monitored during its long dream to
become a child. Shifting head and arm to massage her nape, she is transfixed. “Look! Look what you are doing.”
Veronica looks down at herself. All this time her right hand has been holding the open tube of cocoa butter. Her left hand, more knowing, and somewhere along the path of reflection holding out its palm, is now circling one of her nipples then the other one, round and round, creaming them.
Wert, come to the corridor side of the unit to reassure his wife, smiles to himself. The door here reminds him of the smart but jerry-built door of their apartment at home, a nasty modern flat and more than he can afford, but the layout convenient for a double establishment. Through such doors the lowest conversation carries. The bathhouse cackle reassures him now as always, giving him a double dose late in life of what he’d learned so tardily to respect—that life’s smaller details are often its holiest. At home, too, the voices often change timbres, the wife now in Switzerland softening hers to a dove’s. The Soraya here, since her fertility, has now and then taken to a cawing which amuses and heartens him. He lingers to hear it before he knocks. The Courier at times reminds him of his entire apartment house.
Look, what you are doing!
Veronica, with her crow’s croak, can usually be heard keeping her end up. Today she answers so softly the words are inaudible.
He’s always tried to keep up with what he thinks of as the particulars. His whole career has been formally drummed by those small gestures, less than deed but more than manners, and local to no country. No need to be nostalgic about them. The little details called human, which merely means they take place well short of the emotions, are the likeliest to go on happening. Catastrophe doesn’t dislodge them. Sometimes they’re part of the horror; sometimes they appear to assuage it. NASA has no manual concerning them.
He has in his hand a blunt plastic container not intended for aerated stuff but adaptable. Tuohy stores his “pop” in them. By further adaptation one may drink from them. They are for vomit. Carrying an empty, he has broken into certain stores in the Payload Bay and made a sweating, dangerous and illegal transfer of federal property.
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