by John Park
“. . . perpetual cyclones,” he said. “Worse than here. Even the radar’s patchy. You’d have to go down there and explore, and no one’s going to send a dirigible into weather like that. If you know anyone in the shipbuilding business, they’ve got a career ahead of them.”
Closing down the folder, he bent to put it in a briefcase standing against the wall. The woman thanked him and turned and saw Elinda.
“You’re not at the clinic,” said Jessamyn; “so you must be here investigating, right?” She carried an old coil-backed notebook, opened to pencil sketches.
“Maybe.” Elinda wanted to talk to Robert Strickland if he turned up. The astronaut eyed them both and slipped away. “You’ve got time for your class project, too.”
“I’m just passing through. Shall I give Barbara your love? She’s going to need someone—”
“You said that before.”
“Yes I did, didn’t I?” Jessamyn hesitated, wringing the notebook in her hands until her knuckles whitened. They were blotched with paint. “You mean well, don’t you? I used to think I was a charitable person, once. . . . Enjoy the party. I’d better go before I repeat myself any more.”
Elinda struggled through to the kitchen and found a bottle with a hand-drawn label reading Extra-Galactic Scotch Whisky. Probably from Chris’s own moonshine factory. She poured herself three fingers of yellowish liquid and swallowed a mouthful. As the drink seared its way down her throat, she looked around her. A lot of familiar faces, but few with names she could put to them. She realised that living with Barbara had enabled her to isolate herself from life here. One of the faces she didn’t recognise belonged to another uniformed astronaut with a piratical-looking black beard. He was approaching the drinks table with a couple of empty glasses in each hand.
“Hi,” he said. “Just get here? I’ve been here just long enough to spot a new face. I’m Martin Aguerro. They gave the shuttle crew some ground-time, but only a few of us had the good sense to come along here.”
“Hello,” she muttered, then introduced herself. “I’m one of the farm labourers around here. You can tell from my blunt typing fingers. Are you new in this part of the cosmos, then?”
“Just here a month now. We’ve been setting up the new communications satellite net. So you people won’t get lost when you finally get time to explore down here properly.”
“Then you didn’t have to go through a lot of retraining? You didn’t lose it when you came through the Knot?”
“Oh, no—we were lucky. Or maybe someone’s starting to figure out how to get people through safely. The whole crew came across intact. I’ve heard it’s the personal details that get lost most.”
“Yes, it was that way with me.”
“Oh,” he said, “you had some bad luck, did you? Why don’t you come into the other room; a group of us are talking about that sort of thing, and they’re waiting for these refills.”
“You remember everything, and you’re happy out here? Or do you expect to go back?” she asked as she followed him through the crowd. No sign of Strickland. Nor of Jon Grebbel.
“No. I like the challenges. And the company”—with a quick smile over his shoulder—“and yes, the chances of regular two-way travel are looking better. If they can work out a good fix for the amnesia thing, you might find yourself going back and visiting in a few years.”
“Maybe, but I’m still wondering what brought me here. Maybe I had some huge ambition that could only be fulfilled here—ruler of a galactic empire or something—or I’d run away with the secret to making turkey goulash. If I knew why I’d come, perhaps I’d be making plans, starting an army or a cooking school.”
She followed him to a corner of the living room where a large terracotta mushroom was mounted on the wall. It didn’t look like the usual work of Karl and Hannah over in Building Materials. Maybe Chris or one of his group had made it. A couple of other astronauts—an oriental woman and a short, red-haired man—were part of a group talking to Carlo. He blinked when he saw her and made introductions, then turned to listen to the woman.
“In the lab I’m keeping a rider and its host apart,” she said, “and if I present the host with a stuffed oviphagus, the host goes into normal protective behavioural mode and attacks. Quite savagely. Now this rider has been conditioned from hatching to identify with the oviphage; it’s almost a case of classical imprinting. In my experiment, I let it go to the host and present the oviphage again. Then the host treats the eggstealer as one of the family. I believe with a bit more work we could get it to try to copulate with the ovirattus. It’s fascinating because only the local fauna show anything like this intensity of mental symbiosis.”
“Does the, the host behave any differently to the rat thing after the rider has been so friendly towards it?” Elinda asked. “Does it remember what it did when the rider had control of it?”
“The trouble is, no one really understands memory,” Carlo said, after the woman smiled and shrugged. “We probably know less about how it works now than we thought we did twenty years ago. They used to talk about it in terms of holograms—each individual item stored as a pattern in the whole brain. Now that seems to be too simple. The way you can lose particular chunks of information on the way here, it seems that different types of information are stored in different areas—or maybe stored in special ways. . . .”
“If you’re so much in doubt,” a voice said diffidently, “how do you go about treating people after we get here?” Elinda half turned and found Grebbel at her shoulder. He gave her a thin smile. She had the impression he had been listening for some time, hidden on the fringe of the group. His face was pale and she could see vertical bands of muscle in his cheeks.
Carlo shrugged and smiled. “It’s the boss’s area. He’s a genius at what he does, but I don’t think even he really knows why most of it works. Still, the technique does get results.”
“Well, that’s all that matters, isn’t it?” said the woman astronaut, with just enough suggestion of sarcasm to make Carlo and Grebbel both look at her. Martin, who had been eyeing Grebbel intently, gave her a hard look and emptied his glass.
“What have you lost, after all?” said one of the others.
“That’s just the point, isn’t it,” Grebbel said. “Who knows? And then why should we care?” He spread his arms theatrically, slopping his drink. The scars on his wrist were livid pink. “All the baggage of our past lives—cast off, abandoned, sent to another airport. Has that ever happened to you? Or you? Are you sure? You don’t remember! Congratulations! Give the lady another drink.”
He leaned forward conspiratorially. “Don’t breathe a word, but neither do I—isn’t it wonderful? Freedom! All of that burden gone, sloughed off like an old skin, an outgrown chrysalis. And you—how do you manage to go through the days, with that much history bending your shoulders? I bet you can even recall things like your tenth birthday party, or what it felt like to be given a puppy, or the first time you put on a condom. Shit, I bet you can even remember what you called the things then. How can you stand it? And when you pick your nose like that, you can remember your mother scolding you. My god—maybe you even have some idea what makes you do it. With all those memories, I’ll bet you can actually work out some of what makes you the way you are. Intolerable! Thank god I’m free of all that pressure—I don’t even know what makes me talk like this, what makes me so happy about it all. . . .”
There was some uncomfortable laughter as Grebbel’s audience tried to decide how much of his performance was foolery.
He lifted his glass to his lips, and Elinda saw how the liquid shook in it.
“A joke,” he said to the group at large. “Or is it?”
“Whatever it was,” said Martin, “that’s enough of it.”
Grebbel turned and stared at him. “You don’t like the show? Strikes a bit close to the bone, somehow? Now, how could that be?”
Martin shook his head, started to turn away. Grebbel raised his voice, and the man
stopped.
“Tell me, will you. Why are you offended? Because you’re having to crawl in the mud with the rest of us? Because you’re not up there above it all? Please tell us, tell us all.”
Martin drew a breath, then shook his head and headed for the kitchen.
“Ah,” said Grebbel loudly, “the burden of knowledge.”
Elinda caught his eye. “Take it easy,” she whispered. “And hello again.”
There was sweat in the roots of his hair. He looked at her, then swallowed his drink and moved to face her, with his back to the others. Closing his eyes, he gestured vaguely. “I don’t know why I did that, any of it.” His voice was low now, and strained. Abruptly he swung away from her and vanished into the crowd.
She sipped at her drink, found it was empty. Someone was talking to her, telling her about his plans for the next spring. She was captivated by the whiteness of her fingers on the empty glass. The tendons in her wrist stood out, quivering. The man said something about another drink, and prised the glass out of her hand. She remembered Barbara saying It’s all right, whatever you’ve left behind there, it’s another life, another person, let it stay forgotten, and the secret warmth the words brought. A guilty warmth, like swallowing booze to drown a bad conscience. Guilt? She shivered and pushed her way out of the room.
Grebbel was not in the kitchen, but she saw a group outside in the back. She got her coat and boots and went out. They were huddled around what looked like a length of thirty-centimetre-diameter pipe angled towards the sky. One of the men was crouched over, apparently examining the surface of the pipe, which she belatedly realised was a telescope. Someone else was pointing out some of the brighter stars, visible though a large gap in the clouds. “. . . those three are the methylene group, and then there’s the hydroxy—there, and there. It’s the constellation Booze, just waiting to be named.”
The man at the telescope straightened up from the eyepiece. “Anyone else?”
“What are you looking at?” she asked.
“Chronos, the gas giant. The moons are too bright to see much else. One of his satellites just came out of eclipse, I think, but it’s hard to be sure.”
“What about the Knot? Could you see that?”
“Not with any instrument here. Remember, it went undetected for centuries back on Earth. Have a look at Chronos here, anyway.”
In the eyepiece, a silvery yellow ball bounced and shivered against a deep blue background. After a few moments, her eyes adjusted enough to pick out two lighter arcs across the disc and a dusky band between them. When she asked about them, the man explained that there were fairly regular cloud patterns on the surface, but the darker band was the planet’s rings and their shadow on its surface, which were overlapping in their line of sight.
She relinquished the eyepiece to another watcher, confirmed that Grebbel was not among the crowd here and went back inside.
She finally found him crouched in the dark at the foot of the basement steps. Lengths of firewood as thick as her wrist lay snapped at his feet, their splintered ends like needles. He had another piece in his hands and was straining at it, his teeth bared, his forearms quivering with the pressure. The wood snapped with a sound like a gunshot and the breath came out of him in a snarl.
He saw her then, and let the wood clatter onto the concrete floor, and put his face in his hands.
“Why does it matter that much,” she asked, “what you’ve lost?”
“A dark, empty box,” he whispered through his hands. “It’s like that—like an empty cellar. Like a nightmare . . . caves, tunnels, things snuffling . . . I haven’t got the words.” He fell silent for a few moments, then lifted his head and looked at her. “And how are you enjoying the party?”
“Oh,” she said, and took a step forward. “I haven’t been here long. I was working. I’ve been getting behind at work; I didn’t get in at all this morning.”
He nodded. “The clinic. Any news?”
“Yeah. They still don’t have a goddamned clue what’s wrong.” She shook her head. “I was there for ten minutes, maybe. There wasn’t any point in staying. She didn’t know where she was, she didn’t even know I was there.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “if that helps at all. What about the other thing, the investigation?”
“A few hints, not much more. I’ll try something else tomorrow. We can talk about it later. You must have bruised your hands. Those sticks are strong.”
Grebbel shrugged. “They’ll mend. I don’t know where all that came from. And that’s the point. I don’t know—so much . . . Christ, why did I come down here?”
“It doesn’t seem to be doing you any good, does it? Let’s get some air.”
The party sounds faded behind them. Under the light of the twin moons the clouds boiled and the mountaintops gleamed like icebergs in a frozen raging sea.
“And when she told me my tubes had been tied,” Elinda said, “I just panicked. I couldn’t imagine that I’d do that—have done that. It was like having a stranger in my own body. . . . Perhaps I do know some of what you were going through tonight. Do you want to walk a bit further up the hill? I’m not looking forward to going into an empty home again, after seeing her like that. I haven’t been doing much housekeeping lately, but I can probably find us something to drink.”
At the front door, Grebbel watched her fumble a key from her pocket. Her shoulders were stiff and the tendons in the nape of her neck were caught by the moonlight as she bent towards the lock. An insect strummed, making a sound like over-taut wires in a wind; and the wind itself sounded among the trees—a long breath deeply indrawn, held, then lingeringly exhaled.
The door opened onto darkness. Stepping into it, she turned, her face a blur of moon-shadow, and gestured without speaking. He followed, and they brushed together as they pulled off boots and coats—arms and shoulders, awkward elbows.
He was in the living room, with something softer than wood under his feet. He could make out a table by the window, a dark painting on the wall, a couple of armchairs, a couch—and she was moving quietly to one wall, bending over something. A match sputtered and flared, flung her shadow against the ceiling, and left him with a vision of scalloped gold from ear, cheek and hair. Then there was a steady, paler glow. She straightened, holding an oil lamp, and put it on the corner of the table. “Emergency lighting,” she said softly. “We don’t open the blinds at night and I don’t have candles. And I think this is an emergency, don’t you?”
The light caught her cheek and hair, picked out two creases between her eyes. Her lower lip was held between her teeth, giving her a pensive look. Since they had met this evening, something had changed, but he could not have said how or when. She lifted her head a fraction and swallowed, “I can get you a drink now,” she whispered. Her eyes were large and very dark. “If you want.”
He shook his head, and found he could not speak.
As he reached for her, she was already moving towards him.
They held each other, and at first the warmth was enough, the weight and pressure against arms and chest. Then, almost without volition, came the need to touch, to explore. Through layers of clothing, fingers traced the curves of spines, the bulky shapes of shoulder, ribcage, scapula—moved to the skin of nape and ears, and the cushioned roundness of the skull. Lips brushed forehead, felt the softness of a cheek, worked against other lips that opened for the tongue, then moved to the throat, where teeth nipped at the skin beside the hurrying pulse, and came to rest in the smooth hollow at its base.
There was a pause, filled with the sound of breathing, as they stood on the edge of familiar, unknown realms. Leaning together, they hardly seemed to move. Then their fingers began to work on buttons and clasps, slowly, teasingly at first, then more hurriedly, getting in each other’s way, until the urgency became too great, and they had to break apart and pull off what still separated them.
Again, a pause, while they looked at each other in the lamplight, a time for anticipation,
for thoughts of vulnerability and delight. Slowly they moved back together. Now the explorations began again, seeking, for him, the secret touch and slide that would bring sensation, would reveal the key to her joy; for her, the ache of needs once known and fulfilled and then forgotten. Palms stroked, fingers teased and probed, and were followed by the liquid flicker of a tongue.
They had found their way to the couch, and lay face to face, one above the other. But their faces were transformed. Expressions of remote concentration intensified as their bodies worked—became gapes of astonishment protracted almost to pain. For each of them, time had ceased to flow. Space and awareness contracted to the sensation of the other and the rising tension. The world shrank to the darkened room and their two bodies. Time had stopped and yet stretched to eternity. And then it burst. One of them moaned, and then the other. As they shuddered against each other, a wave of unbeing swept them away.
The light was grey. Without moving, Grebbel let it filter through his eyelids, while awareness crept back. Whatever had passed between them was spent for now, and he tried to understand it. The sense that something had taken control of him—of his actions, of even his wishes and desires—was disturbing. He felt that the direction of his life had been changed, perhaps taken out of his hands. And yet . . . he let his eyes open enough to look at the woman whose vulnerability to pleasure had given her into his power. He saw only the turn of a shoulder, the lobe of an ear emerging from a dim tangle of hair, but knew he was at the mercy of her weakness.
“You’re awake, aren’t you?” she said. “I’ve been listening to you breathe.”
When he looked, she was watching him steadily.
“I dreamt of snow,” he said. “I dreamt I was holding you and the snow was blowing outside, piling up, and I thought we might be able to hide under it for as long as we liked. Then there was a sound. . . .”