Tresses swirled in radiance and darkness as she pivoted on her arm. The free hand brushed a lock aside to clear sight for her. "Oh. The top of the morning to you," she hailed, though in a hushed voice.
"Morning - well, yes, our clocks do say eight hundred - as close to a morning as we'll ever know," he blurted. Immediately:
"I was looking for you."
"Were you that? Why?"
He shoved from the doorframe, arrowed across to the table, caught it and let his body stream free like hers, directly across from her. This close to him, her face was clear in the shinings from outside, while shadows brought forth the sculpturing of it. His speech stumbled: "I noticed what trouble you were having at breakfast-"
"Aye, weightlessness is grand until one must clean up and stash things, then it becomes a polka-dotted bitch." While supplies did include plenty of squeeze-tube rations and other materials intended for these conditions, housekeeping for nine humans and a nonhuman got complicated even when the quartermaster was experienced. "Well, my ancestors outlived worse. Only think, I might have been a maidservant in a Victorian Protestant home! I'll be learning the way of this."
"You shouldn't have to cope alone, now that Su will be too busy. I- I can help, Caitlin."
"What? Will yourself not be in hourly demand?"
"No. I'll get jobs, of course, but- Oh, true, every spaceman's trained to assist in some kind of research, and when we've no proper scientists along - Well, the studies that our best qualified people can carry out won't need much support from me. Phil Weisenberg can generally handle the setting-up and so forth. I've talked with him and he agrees I can probably be more useful, most of the time, helping you... if you want," Leirio finished, dropping his glance. "Why, that's dear of you and I thank you." She reached to clasp his shoulder. "May the roads you take be always soft beneath your feet."
"We, we have to help each other... be as kind to each other as we can," he mumbled. "Don't we? While we live? There will never be any roads really for us, roads we can walk on, ever again."
She smiled. "Sure, and you're not losing heart already, are you, Martti, lad? When we've only just snatched our lives back to us and won free?"
"Free?" His gaze swung wildly about, he gripped the table edge with needless force, till his nails whitened. "Locked in a metal shell, blundering blind through space as long as our food holds out, no longer, if we don't go crazy first-" He wrestled for control.
She stroked his head and made comforting noises low in her throat. At last he could say with simple despair, "You do know, don't you, we're lost? Fidelio's confirmed his folk have never been here. We'll grope from T machine to T machine- In a thousand years, spending billions of probes, the Betans found how to go between a couple of score stars... and no Others, nobody to help... Caitlin, we're done for."
She shook her head, still smiling through the hair that streamed athwart stars, and answered quietly, well-nigh merrily, "I'll believe that of me when they lay the coppers on my eyes, and maybe not then. But suppose the thing that you say is the worst, Martti, darling."
He jerked violently. "Och," she breathed, "you're in bad shape, so you are. If you're to help me, let me help you first. Hold still."
In a deft maneuver she released the table, drew alongside him and slightly behind, caught his left arm in her left hand and pinned his legs between her knees. He uttered amazement. "Easy, lad, easy," she said. "I must be anchoring myself if I'm to give you the good strong back rub you need." Her right hand went over him. "Aye, a rat's nest of Charlie horses, as my father would say were he less dignified and more Irish. Peel down your coverall to the waist."
He trembled as he obeyed. "Relax," she urged. "Let go. We'll drift loose, but sooner or later we'll fetch up against a wall- a bulkhead- and meanwhile I can be loosening of that poor latissimus dorsi for you."
Kneading, she chuckled. "All my own invention. Free fall sex made me wonder about free fall massage, the more so when himself often is tensed- No, easy, I told you, easy."
Looking about her as she worked: "Suppose we shall indeed go lost for some years, until our food is no more and each of us must choose how to die. I do not admit this is the case, mind you, but suppose it is. What a grand fate!"
"Huh?" he exclaimed. "You can't be serious."
"I am that. Oh, it will be hard to give up mountains and seas, sunshine through rain, a hearthfire at evening. But think, Martti, dear. Look. The glory yonder, and we making ready to know it- then more suns, more worlds, more beauties and marvels, maybe at last a new Demeter for us, though if not, why, then at the end our few years out here in the universe will have held more than most centuries ever did before." Her hold upon him tightened, her working hand grew eager. "Be glad in your life!"
* * *
Intended for the unknown, Chinook bore a superb panoply of scientific instruments. But save for the two computermen, no specialist in any of their uses was aboard. Sufficient technical knowledge, including the knowledge of how to look things up, existed among the travelers that, largely under Weisenberg's guidance, they could find ways to learn something about the realm wherein they were stranded. However, that might prove to be fatally little.
Then Joelle made her announcement to captain and engineer:
Fidelio had the skill. His race had explored many planetary systems, no two alike. Its professional spacefarers included a cadre trained in making and interpreting an enormous range of observations, against the day when the next robot probe would return with the news that it had found another gateway back. He had been one such, as well as a xenological officer who spoke for his ship when she visited aliens. The combination had gotten him picked for Emissary.
"His technique involves holothetics, as you should expect," she cautioned. `We'll have to modify a unit for him to use. The way was developed on Beta, and between us we remember fairly well what it is. But you realize a certain amount of cut-and-try is necessary. Furthermore, our equipment is crude by his standards."
"Could we build him the right kind?" Weisenberg asked.
"If you were thrown back in time to Galileo, could you build him a hundred-meter orbiting reflector?" she gibed. "Oh, I daresay a few minor improvements here and there will be possible for us in due course, especially in software. At present, though, we must get what data we can. You go do the obvious things, determine masses, take spectrograms, et cetera. You have to do them anyway. After Fidelio's linkage is ready, he can tell you what kind of additional information he and I will need, particularly information fed into us directly and continuously.
"Let us alone to consult. Go about your business. I'll tell you what else to do and when."
Brodersen lifted a brow without saying anything. She recognized his "My, isn't the air kind of thin on top of that high horse?" expression from of old. He never used it on me before! went through her like ice. He was always too respectful of my mind. What's changed him? The stress of this expedition? Thai Caitlin adventuress?
The question persisted in her through the days that followed. Not that she was obsessed: except by work, like everybody else. Nevertheless it came back into her awareness again and again, most sharply when she was trying to sleep.
This was often difficult. She had never taken naturally to weightlessness. To her, the pleasure of floating and flying was slight compared to the tedium of long daily times at the exercise machines lest her blood go stale and her very bones dwindle. (The rest talked or sang or watched shows, that kind of thing. She cared for none of it. Theoretically she could have retreated into her head, where mathematics and the memory of the Noumenon dwelt, as she frequently did at leisure. But the dull, sweaty exertions were too nagging.) Worse, just as she was on the edge of dreams, more and more she would rouse with a gasp from a sense of falling into a fathomless pit. Then she must drift in the dark at the end of her leash and try for calm. Thoughts roiled forth which she did not want.
Why do I care that Dan no longer cares? He was never more to me than an animal, smarter and stronger than most, excellent in bed, yet only an animal to fill some of those hours when I was being only an animal. If my body wants use, he intimated he'd oblige - probably not now, he's probably too harassed and uncertain, but eventually. Or I could turn to... - Rueda, I suppose. A man of the world like him would see past my post-menopausal gray hair, and doubtless be quite an artist. Never mind dignity. Sex is a mere bodily need, like defecation.
Is it? Eric, Eric!
Hold. Wait. It isn't even a need. I've gone close to nine years without and hankered little and seldom.
Is the fear of death making me feel lonely? We are going to die out here. The odds against us finding our way back are... no, not incalculable... ridiculous... - But if we take reasonable care, given reasonable luck, we ought to have, oh, ten years until the food is gone. With no geriatrician aboard, I could be dead of bodily failure earlier than that.
Besides, I learned long ago not to fear death. Having looked straight into Reality- There is no "I" to dread the loss of. There is a temporary association of mitochondria, eukaryotic cells, intestinal flora, and the like, the whole symbiosis shading off into the world around it that begot it, serving no end except the perpetuation of the genes within. Were the immortality of my "person" offered me, I would not want it. Too petty, amidst atoms, eons, and galaxies.
Indeed, I should welcome this unparalleled chance to explore, experience, learn. That I cannot report my findings to my colleagues is regrettable. However, from my viewpoint it is the loss of a very trivial satisfaction compared to what awaits me in the next decade.
Then why do I want somebody holding me? Why is it so long till mornwatch and my work?
Work was absorbing despite every exasperation of zero gravity and Murphy's Law. The aim was to adapt Chinook's holothetic system for Fidelio. First came the mechanical part, a helmet to fit his skull and attachments for the rest of his frame. This was easy. Thereafter came the electronics, circuits built and adjusted to resonate with a nervous web that was the consequence of several billion years of separate evolution. This would have been a major research project if it had not already been one on Beta. As was, most of the requirements were known. Just the same, Su Granville and Joelle herself must spend hour upon hour writing programs and then in linkage, whenever Wiesenberg had supplied a new fistful of data from his instruments. Leino helped somewhat, and the others did what jackleg jobs they could as occasion demanded. Else they were engaged in astronomy and space physics. Because they had to be kept fed and their clothes and bedding laundered, Caitlin put down her eagerness and did that for the cause of survival. Often at mess or during exercise periods she sang to them. That was almost the only recreation that anybody got.
Hardware available, the true challenge came: to create the basic program by which Fidelio would integrate himself with the computer. Even among humans, each holothete was a unique case. Fidelio was not human. Furthermore, Betan computer technology had considerable differences from Terrestrial. (Yet oddly enough, insofar as comparisons were possible, it did not seem that holothetes of either species had a deeper or broader insight than those of the other. Betan machines possessed numerous superiorities, but, linked into them, Joelle had functioned more or less the same as at home. Did brains have equal limitations? Or did the Ultimate itself?)
Again, and in a still higher degree, the task would have been hopeless had it not been accomplished beforehand on Beta, when mutual linkage of members of the two races was seen as desirable. Joelle and Fidelio were simply trying to duplicate something from Emissary which they remembered fairly well... except that there was nothing simple involved. Instead there was a whole new computer language - practically a new semantics - plus an elaborate program for translating to a language the Chinook machine could handle, plus a program for translating back, plus an openended set of special instructions. Joelle and Fidelio had the fundamentals in their heads and knew in a general way how to reconstruct the details, by brute-strength logic, calculation, and experiment.
Not as an analogy but as a metaphor: The problem was like that which would face a Peruvian called upon to interpret between a Chinese and an Arab, when he is rusty in both their tongues, the former stutters, and the latter is a deaf-mute.
Without linkage, the problem would have been insoluble. Susanne would hook herself up and check tentative programs for inconsistencies and inadequacies, when she wasn't needed for the ongoing research elsewhere. Joelle and Fidelio would then try them out. This was hard on Joelle; she would perceive Reality distorted, bleached, fevered, and afterward have nightmares, in which she most commonly saw Eric's rotted corpse. She would wake, tell herself Fidelio wasn't complaining, though it must be worse for him, and go back to work. To enter the pure Noumenon again was always healing.
Chinook lay for a pair of weeks in orbit around the planet which humans had given no name.
"Everything seems ready, female of intellect," he said when he had given the assembly a careful examination. He used the speech, throaty and whistling, that his people did in air. It was much easier for him than Spanish. "Let us make a trial and, if we find we are on a strong tide, go straight ahead to sense the wholeness of this volume-where-we-swim."
She felt a smile at the idiom. It faded as she looked at him. Half a sea creature, he was beautiful in free fall. Long and richly brown, his body undulated from prowlike muzzle and lapis lazuli eyes to the end of the powerful, precisely controlled tail; each digit of the six limbs knew what it did, and its motion flowed. His tang as of iodine nigh overwhelmed her with memories of beaches on Earth, surf and wind, sunlight and gull wings. How wrong that he was caged in this narrowness between two computer stacks, that meters and switches were before him instead of living underwater fronds, that his sight was bounded by painted metal instead of moving green depths and, overhead, a splintered radiance.
