HEXAMNION

by Chan Davis

It has been over ten years since the last, new, Chan Davis story appeared, so it is a pleasure to welcome him back to the ranks. During the forties his name was a familiar one in the magazines, but since then stories like "Adrift on the Policy Level" and "The Nightmare" could be found only in the anthologies. The author is a professor of mathematics, a pure mathematician whose recognized ability brought him a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study. Yet he is still an involved man who speaks out for what he believes in, so much so that his protest politics earned him dismissal from one university position and a six-month prison sentence. A wonder and a delight in an era when men in high stations were knuckling under to the McCarthyites. Here he blends science and humanity in a story with the absolutely correct title.

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You'll never understand, Frank Coglan. You'll never know how it was. You think the hardest part of your learning is over—eight weeks, and Ruth and Jay say how fast it was, very delighted—but you'll never learn really.
I remember the first day you came. Ruth and Jay had told us long ahead of time (as much as they could: the main thing for us was seeing you and talking to you). The last few days we had hardly been listening to them, we were too busy talking among ourselves about how we could include you.
Naturally, while we talked we moved, back and forth across the room—you know us…
Well, no! I know us. You don't know. That's just the most obvious part of all you'll never know. You don't know how we moved while we talked about you, because it's never been the same since, and never will be. It's gone. The six of us know. Ruth and Jay may know—they seem to understand almost everything about us.
You'll never know.
The ease and trust we had we'll never have again. And of course what we were talking about that day was how to include you.
Really that was illusory, as we found out. Really this was just the last few hours of—well, of us. The Initials.
You think I'm sentimentalizing if I think of the Garden of Eden now? You think our years in our quadrant were false even before they were disturbed, like a catatonic's dream? Well, maybe Adam and Eve were doomed from the beginning to lose their Garden; that depends on who's telling the story. But if the story means anything, I can tell you this about Adam and Eve, when they had fallen: they felt they had lost something.
Vara and me getting dressed that last morning. Just like every morning before it. You know the belts we wear: soft fiber-glass braid, joined to a shoulder halter, all in bright frank colors. We always dressed together when we waked, boys and girls, and Vara and I tied each other's belts on; A-Dzong and Haidee; Maria and Ted. Easy enough to get dressed one by one, in separate alcoves, Earth-style; but it was part of our life to do it together, in the middle of the room. Not really in pairs. During that quarter-hour after we waked up in the morning, each of the six would touch every other.
All day, every time one of the other Initials said to me, "Emilio," there was a joining which reached back in time to the waking together, and a feeling of the safe sleep before that. It was a feeling and poetry reaching farther. I never could have talked about it then because I had never had the experience of not having it. And who would I have needed to talk about it to?
We didn't have any feeling of impending loss, or savoring the last hour before you came. Just that the side of the room with the door was important. You know the six arms of the room, extending out from the central area in all three perpendicular directions. A lot of our "games," as you call them, use the six arms as a symmetrical "playing field," but now one arm was special. It was the first time anything important had ever been expected at the door.
I remember circling-four with Vara, A-Dzong, and Haidee, leaving a place in the middle for you, the unknown newcomer who wouldn't know how to "play"; Maria and Ted in fast trajectory toward us, down the two arms perpendicular to our circle; me taking the main push of Maria's momentum, A-Dzong most of Ted's, so the circle of four was set precessing.
"Emilio, how can he join that if he's not used to free-fall?"
"He just has to be at the center."
"But—he can't just be there, he has to…"
"I know," I said, but I didn't know how to finish.
The four of us touched down on alternating corners of the central well, while Maria and Ted bounced back to us from the ends of two of the corridor arms. They met and circled, facing the door. The rest of us came out, each spinning about the axis leading to the door; drifting slowly away from the door; watching the door. Oval of dull blue ceramic, the same as the surrounding wall, spinning in my field of view as I spun.
Ted said hollowly, "Frank Coglan," expressing our anticipation and making fun of it at the same time. We laughed lightly, uneasily.
A gentle chime said the intercom was now on, and Jay's voice said, "Frank Coglan's here, kids, he made the trip fine."
"Good."
"Maybe he's still a little bit rocky from free-fall, he's not really used to it yet—"
"No, I'm all right," we heard your voice on the intercom,
"Want to join them right away, Frank?"
"Sure."
We were together facing the door from the opposite end of the room. The door opened and we saw you, dressed in slacks, shirt, and harness-belts like ours.
"Hello," we said.
"Hi, kids," you said.
Then we laughed. Great way to get off on the right foot with the newcomer! Looking back, I see that none of our reactions was right. But after all—it was the first time we'd ever looked at a stranger's face and said hello. It was the first time we heard anybody but Ruth and Jay call us "kids." The situation was exciting, upsetting, and funny. It wasn't just the way you looked.
But it was that too. Here was a person in the room with us, the same size and age… but all flattened up! Your elbows held close in, touching your waist! Your chin in, almost touching your chest! Your legs and spine practically in a straight line! And staying still! To us it gave the irresistible impression that you were bound in an invisible hammock.
We laughed.
I guess we looked funny to you too. Had Ruth and Jay given you a look at us through a one-way window? I doubt it.
You just smiled and waited. You had been prepared for a shock, so you took it better-No, that's not the reason. We had been prepared too. I knew stories where the new kid was taunted by the neighborhood gang.
I said, "I'm sorry."
Then you laughed, offhand. "That's okay." You looked around, reached out a hand to steady yourself. (Steady yourself? Why? That's what we automatically said to ourselves. Why not just push off, stay in motion toward another wall?)
You said, "Gee, this room's so small."
"Small?" said A-Dzong. "Is it? How large are rooms in New York?"
"Oh, it's much bigger than most rooms, but my God, you've spent sixteen whole years here."
And we hung on that, evaluating our lives from your vantage. That was the conversation for a good hour. Fascinating, for us. "Prison!" you said at one point. I wonder what Ruth and Jay thought, listening on the intercom.
But you see what had happened? The new kid had become the boss, just like that. We've been just a bit off balance ever since, and you, with your lifetime of meeting new people and new places, have been more at home in our quadrant than we have. To him that has shall be given.
"How come you had to stay in here all by yourselves?" you asked.
A-Dzong said, "Well, you know what the plan was. Space travelers were always clumsy because in free-fall they kept their lifelong habits of moving in gravity. So we were the experiment of learning how to live in free-fall. The six of us were brought up here as infants, without any of this sitting and crawling and standing you do down on Earth. We just moved in what seemed the natural way. If we'd been able to see Ruth and Jay, we'd have copied their motions and not invented our own way."
"I know, I know, but to stay in this quadrant for sixteen years? Why wouldn't they let you out eventually, for God's sake?"
"We never asked them."
"Well," said Vara, "but they did say this: until we were nearly full-grown, there was danger that our habits wouldn't be fixed, and we'd lose the good of the experiment. Then the last few years they figured we needed to stay in familiar surroundings while we learned about society."
"Read books about the Earth, and so forth."
"You mean up till then you never had fairy tales or stories or anything?"
"Until we were eleven, that's right"
"They thought that might give us things to imitate too," added
A-Dzong, "and keep us from inventing out own ways. And it would have."
"Just Ruth and Jay talked with us. About the station, space flight, plenty of things. And we read. But not about how people act"
"Until you were eleven."
That's right. Even then, no illustrated books or movies."
"But didn't you want to go out into the other quadrants?"
"Well, we've been there a few hours at a time, because we couldn't learn the station thoroughly otherwise. Ruth and Jay stayed out of sight then."
"Didn't you ever want to see them?"
Vara said, "I guess free-fall isn't the only reason we're different from other kids."
I've thought a lot about that, Frank Coglan. Did Adam and Eve throw tantrums wanting to see Heaven? How big was the Garden, and did it matter to them?
That's a perfectly uninteresting question, isn't it: understanding the emotions of our childhood. What's interesting is understanding the common human condition, but we're just the Initials, only six of us, and our condition is peculiar to us. All that we're called on to do now is to teach you, and the others that are coming up, how to live in free-fall—and to fit into your social ways, since you can't accept ours, or even notice them except with impatience. Right?
Even with Vara, you'll always be setting the standard, never adapting to her. I can see.
I didn't notice at first that you were attracted to Vara.
"Sexually attracted" is an expression like "crowd" or "rainstorm" for us: We learned all the vocabulary because the great foreign Earth was an intricate marvel, but we weren't sure how any of it might apply to us. Our beautiful touching all day long we never called caresses. Our elaborate trajectories we never called dances.
Because the things the boots said with those Earth words didn't seem to describe us.
If you want to know if boys touched boys among us and girls touched girls, the answer is yes. But not at all as often as boys touched girls.
You don't know, because it was never natural after you came. Once, the second day, you laughed when you saw us all holding hands and called us a "daisy-chain." We were startled and drifted apart. You never made fun of us after that, but still we often stayed apart when inside we were aching for that contact. Our constraint came from the fact we couldn't include you, maybe. Or that we couldn't explain. Or maybe it was personal, Frank Coglan, to your own cocky self.
So there was this, which we couldn't put into irrelevant Earth vocabulary to tell you, and in our minds it was all mixed up with the way to live in free-fall, which we were trying to teach you,
Ruth suggested, "Teach him how you play ball," and that was good for a few hours. When each of us threw from the end of one of the arms, with three different balls (one for each perpendicular corridor), and you stood near the center and watched, you could begin to see why our posture might be efficient. And you could see how accurate a ball game in free-fall can be. I don't think any game on Earth calls for three small balls to meet in mid-air, for instance.
But it wasn't much of a success when you tried to join in. I mean, as a game. As a lesson, it was a success. You learned how different it feels to throw from mid-air or to throw pushing off from a wall; you began to get the feel of why we do almost everything with back arched and feet drawn up behind—and why we belay our belts to wall cleats for a lot of things, including throwing; you tried adapting your own throwing habits to our games.
That was the trouble: this was too good a hope, wasn't it, to be able to play catch. You know how to play catch. It was frustrating to find that, by our standards, you couldn't, and that's the only time I ever saw it really get to you.
Ruth's voice came soothing over the intercom again, "I've tried doing that their way too, Frank, and I don't think I'll ever learn. But you're young," very casually.
"I'll learn," you said, very determined.
Without the ball it was less frustrating. You had to learn out posture, which makes it possible at any moment to push off from a wall on any side. With your posture, what would you do if you drifted up to a wall back first? And you had to learn that one tumbles while in mid-air, back-somersault-ways, pretty constantly all day—just to remain conscious of what's around. Ruth and Jay aren't sure that's necessary, and I know you still find it dizzying, but all these habits which we developed before we were four may help in free-fall, and the more you pick up the better.
The fourth day you spent many hours trying direct trajectories the length of one of the arms. Trying to read something on the way, or to land on a particular spot—things like that. You were good-humored and maybe we were too condescending. (Just as we'd never had a friend, we'd never had a puppy.) But we were merry, and getting back to our old freedom. If you were ever going to fit into it, that was the day it would have had to begin.
Instead, that was the day you made a pass at Vara.
Is that the right term? It's never clear in the books what "make a pass" means concretely. She held your arm when you came up to her; your eyes glinted, you squeezed her arm back and smiled.
Less than we do—did—every day among ourselves? So much less. Why should I feel jealous? Sure, why should I feel jealous.
When we touched, we were just being ourselves. When I saw you squeeze Vara's arm, I was stunned with a word, "sex," big and ugly and jangling. All those other words followed it through my mind, and they weren't names for anything beautiful, the way good-hearted Earth authors tell adolescents. Just there was such a hot constriction of my throat…
And it kept on! I kept on thinking about it, watching you, not knowing what to do. I couldn't say anything about it to Vara or to any of the others.
That doesn't mean the relationship between the Initials could crumble to nothing at the first sight of an unfamiliar face. But when this struck…
Let's see if I can say what happened. Our whole daily life, everything we knew how to do and feel, had been among the six of us. In order to live at all we had to keep living the way we knew. What would you do if you suddenly had a thigh muscle paralyzed? You'd keep trying to walk in the old way, and get a little sick twinge as you canceled that no-longer-possible movement and began something self-conscious and poorer. Have you had that twinge from crossing our room or taking a drink of water in space, Frank Coglan? Well, for me, during those weeks, every response of my whole life gave me that twinge.
It would have been hard for you to be there and shut out of our relationship. But to have you there and superseding it… We hadn't imagined.
In my dreams you were metallic. Your skin was shiny gray, your eyes were pink and molten, and you neither saw nor thought. Awake, I could work and talk with you along with the others, even joke sometimes, but the image I had of you from my dreams never really disappeared. And I was miserable.
This was that whole period, I'm talking about, more than three weeks.
The fight was what freed us. I think it would have, even if Ruth and Jay hadn't overreacted the way they did.
You were asking us how we had got through infancy without seeing Ruth and Jay. That didn't annoy us, even me. We laughed. "It seems hard to change diapers without being seen, eh?"
"Yeah, what did they do, put anesthetic into the air supply?"
"No, they just—changed our diapers," grinned Maria. 'In the first place, we had harnesses like these on, and we were anchored pretty close all the time while we were still helpless. And then when we had to be handled, or put into hammocks to sleep—" She led the way to the end of one of the corridors. "Jay, would you show him?"
He said over the Intercom, "Just a second."
Maria pointed to a rubber diaphragm in a corner of the wall, and presently it bulged toward us, showing five spread fingers: Jay was reaching his arm through and the rubber made a glove for it. He wiggled his fingers. You were startled. You laughed. We, of course, had never seen his arm except this way.
You said to Jay, "Dr. Gercen, how many years since you and your wife have been on Earth?"
"Since the start of the project. Over sixteen years."
"Gee. Why did you ever decide to do that? I mean, nobody asked the Initials, they just took six orphan babies… but you had to decide."
You know I had never wondered that?
Jay said, "Well, Frank, you joined this program, you know, and you're going to be away from Earth for long spells too, I assure you.
"I hope I'm never all alone for sixteen years."
"We see the Initials every day."
"Yeah, but you know what I mean. And I sure hope I never have to change six pairs of diapers through a wall."
Jay laughed easily; but I looked quickly at your face and got a shock. That was another moment where some things we had read about personal relations suddenly turned out to apply to me. You were baiting me: I was supposed to get angry! If I'd thought of myself as somebody who could get angry, I probably would have light away.
Vara laughed too. There was a silence.
Your blue eyes slitted, you laughed through tight lips. "Especially stupes who never grow up." And you pushed off the wall, in the narrow corridor, toward me.
So I had to push you back when you collided with me, and the physical act was what made me able to be angry—not your silly remarks.
I pushed you. The other five had sped down to the other end of the corridor; I followed them as far as the central area, then caught a stanchion and swung back on you again. You didn't know what was hitting you. I didn't need experience fighting; I didn't even need room for maneuver. I always knew how to move to get where I wanted to be, while you were groping for something to hold onto.
You might say, you didn't know which side was up.
I hardly noticed the others. They laughed a little, in a terrified voice.
You said, "Don't hit a guy from behind!'' Of course I was. I'd push more than hit, just once or twice until reaction carried me away from you, then I'd come back in. You were helpless.
Would you have been willing to quit at that point? I didn't know how to stop any more than I'd known how to begin.
Coming back at you one more time, I was on guard only against the possibility of you hitting me. You were away from any wall, and racing the wrong way.
You caught my wrist in one hand. I hadn't thought of that. Pulling, you spun yourself around to face me, and your other hand grabbed my shoulder.
You shook me. I didn't know anyone could be so strong.
I was terrified. You didn't hurt me… Well, that hurt; it still hurts, to have been that scared.
You know who it was that saved me? I might as well tell you. It was Vara who came up behind you, grabbed your head, planted both feet, in the middle of your back, and pulled till you had to let go.
"Emilio!" Jay was calling me over the intercom. How long had he been calling?
You drifted free, your hands to your eyes, blinking to focus. When you looked, you saw us together in a corner, arms linked, staring at you. I was panting, and I got a little whiff of nausea with each breath.
"Emilio! Frank!" No alarm in Jay's voice. "Enough of that already. Listen, don't you think Frank's had enough just learning to maneuver? Let's start showing him around the station."
"Separate the brawling boys, Jay?" He chuckled. "You saw through me."
"For once. Jay, there's no need. We'll be all right." Jay was implacable. "Why don't Vara and I make a start of this—take a few days going through the layout of the station with him, the operation of the station, and so forth."
You answered something intelligent, but I was stunned. Vara and the Gercens showed you around the station together—not like our previous tours when Ruth and Jay had followed us, out of sight, and guided us by intercom.
So for the next two days I was tortured by an anxious feeling left over from the fight, of something unfinished and overdue. Resentment that you had taken Vara away from us. And I must admit, envy that Vara and not I was the first Initial to see Ruth and Jay face-to-face.
I don't know if I looked tortured. Unresponsive, anyway. Out of touch with A-Dzong and the others: I don't know whether any of them were feeling the same.
When I finally started whispering with them, I'm sure Ruth and Jay knew we were planning to ask for more of us to join you outside our quadrant. I don't think they could tell exactly what we were planning.
We worked it out together. But still without rapport; when I'd propose something I'd do it persuasively, speaking as if they'd of course agree, but feeling unsure the whole time. Between the Initials, it's not normal to have to be persuasive.
For the plan to work, Ruth and Jay had to misread our attitude. We asked for me to join you and Vara, and tried to sound like defiant adolescents in asking. Of course Ruth agreed.
We didn't ask to have the door of our room permanently unlocked (though she would have agreed to that too) because we didn't want her to detect too much unprecedented independence and take alarm. Maybe that wasn't the only motive. We enjoyed liberating ourselves.
Ruth let me out to join you and Vara; as I was leaving, Maria took advantage of the movements when the door was open to rig the lock.
It just takes a plastic tab on a yoke of fine wire, left in the lock when the door closes. You figure out things like this when you live in the same station all of your life and learn the operation of every pipe and circuit. Maria probably wasn't noticed doing this even if Ruth was looking right at her.
We had chosen a time when Jay would be asleep. Ruth seemed safer to deal with. Facing her, going down the corridor with her to join you, was anticlimax actually. After sixteen years of her omnipotence, and one day of scheming audacious rebellion, I saw her (white, round face and curly hair—quite a resemblance to Haidee, really—and she was so much smaller than me, it was hard not to laugh.
She holds her body the way you do. Of course. Something else, unexpected: she looks at me when she talks, as you do, and expects me to look at her. Hard to adjust to, when for all these years she's been for me a directionless voice on an intercom.
I felt awkward. At the end of the corridor, before we went into the solar battery service room where you and Vara were, I had to leave Ruth standing a few moments while I did a twisting spin in mid-air. "You make me dizzy," she said gently, but to me it was like stretching—getting back a necessary sense of freedom.
We came into the room with you and Vara. You were embarrassed, I think. Talk was strained, and the four of us kept a physical distance between us.
Then something happened which you may not understand. I said softly, "Culu, ekke." It was in our secret language. What children ever needed one more than we did? What I told her to do in that language, I knew Vara would be sure to do. We were out the door before you or Ruth had time even to turn around.
In another second the door was locked. Ignoring your calls, winking at Vara, I took about two minutes to jam the door so it would be very slow business to open from the inside. Something we had noticed months earlier; two lockers undipped from the wall are almost long enough to fill the corridor so the door won't open; to fill up the remaining centimeters, I pulled out a spare inflatable airlock section, crammed it into the gap, and inflated until it was wedged in good and tight.
I beckoned to Vara; we flew back along the corridor.
Over the intercom, Maria announced with glee, "Ruth and Frank are locked into the solar battery service room, and Jay, if you get out of your hammock you'll find that you're locked into your quarters. Don't worry. You know the Initials are perfectly able to run the station by ourselves. Well, we're taking a turn."
Then she turned the volume on the intercom way down, and the station was all ours. We stopped listening to you, the three of you. We didn't hear a word you said.
It was easy, but it felt good. It might have been still better if it hadn't been so easy… Say, if Jay had taken the precaution of skipping his regular sleeping shifty and kept an eye on us. Then the other four Initials would have had the gratification of surprising him.
We don't have many more facts about him and Ruth, just from having seen them; but our thinking about them is changed, like black-and-white to color, or flat photo to holography, now that we've had power over them. And now that we've been shaken up by you, who aren't tempted to regard the Gercens as the entire surrounding universe. We knew them all along, but now we can perceive them.
I can think about Ruth, locked in the room with you those hours right after we took over. I didn't listen in, but I know how she felt. She wasn't worried or shocked. She thought the rebellion was normal. She may even have been relieved.
I can imagine, now, that Ruth and Jay may have worried about this for years: what limits could they set us that we would refuse to observe? Or should they try to get us to squabble among ourselves? What would make us able to go after something we wanted, and make sure we got it?
They've devoted their lives to the Initials. We're their family, their friends, and their job. They raised us under conditions people aren't made to take—the isolation, I mean, more than the free-fall. And the project succeeded, eh? It produced the information about weightless living. But I don't think they'd have felt satisfied with their work if it had also produced six emotional cripples.
So excuse our prank. I know that when we turned up the intercom after your hours in lock-up, subjected you to a little unnecessary taunting, and then let you out, you were pretty impatient with us. Well, I'm likely to be working with you off and on the rest of my life, Frank Coglan, and we'll have to know how to deal with each other. I want you to understand.
It was no prank. I think it was important, if Initials' lives are important. None of us, even Ruth and Jay, knew how Initials grow up.
Point one, they need a serpent in their Garden. Thanks.
Point two, they don't need to draw blood—at least, not if their "parents" have been like Ruth and Jay—but they do need to take power.
We learned something else about what happens to six kids who touch each other every day and never see anyone else.
Frank Coglan, Vara didn't tell me, but I know you and she had made it together the night before.
Frank Coglan, here's point three. During the hours that the Initials had control of the station, I tried to make love with Vara. Tried to. It's not a question of her being willing—I mean, she's
Vara and I'm Emilio, there's no such thing as one of us refusing the other. We tried to, and we couldn't make it.
She's for you, Frank Coglan. If you and she want it that way. You won't have competition from me, or A-Dzong, or Ted.
Just the other day I overheard Ruth saying something to Jay involving the word "exogamy." Maybe they understand us better than we understand ourselves, again.
Certainly when little Diann came to the station a couple of days later, there was something new. Incredible. She can be just as clumsy as she wants to, with her Earthside posture; she's beautiful, her awkwardness is beautiful, everything's part of it It doesn't matter if I pity her when she has trouble catching on to space life. It doesn't matter if I envy her her Earth childhood. Just everything's okay. I laugh into her eyes, and tingle with anticipation waiting for her to laugh back at me, and right away she laughs back and by the time she does I'm crying.
Diann is for me.
Just the same, there will always be that deep-glowing backdrop to everything in my life, that peaceful kingdom in which we flowered. It's not there for you; not for Diann. It will always be there for me and Vara, and we can't give it to you. You'll never know, Frank Coglan.

HEXAMNION

by Chan Davis

It has been over ten years since the last, new, Chan Davis story appeared, so it is a pleasure to welcome him back to the ranks. During the forties his name was a familiar one in the magazines, but since then stories like "Adrift on the Policy Level" and "The Nightmare" could be found only in the anthologies. The author is a professor of mathematics, a pure mathematician whose recognized ability brought him a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study. Yet he is still an involved man who speaks out for what he believes in, so much so that his protest politics earned him dismissal from one university position and a six-month prison sentence. A wonder and a delight in an era when men in high stations were knuckling under to the McCarthyites. Here he blends science and humanity in a story with the absolutely correct title.

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You'll never understand, Frank Coglan. You'll never know how it was. You think the hardest part of your learning is over—eight weeks, and Ruth and Jay say how fast it was, very delighted—but you'll never learn really.
I remember the first day you came. Ruth and Jay had told us long ahead of time (as much as they could: the main thing for us was seeing you and talking to you). The last few days we had hardly been listening to them, we were too busy talking among ourselves about how we could include you.
Naturally, while we talked we moved, back and forth across the room—you know us…
Well, no! I know us. You don't know. That's just the most obvious part of all you'll never know. You don't know how we moved while we talked about you, because it's never been the same since, and never will be. It's gone. The six of us know. Ruth and Jay may know—they seem to understand almost everything about us.
You'll never know.
The ease and trust we had we'll never have again. And of course what we were talking about that day was how to include you.
Really that was illusory, as we found out. Really this was just the last few hours of—well, of us. The Initials.
You think I'm sentimentalizing if I think of the Garden of Eden now? You think our years in our quadrant were false even before they were disturbed, like a catatonic's dream? Well, maybe Adam and Eve were doomed from the beginning to lose their Garden; that depends on who's telling the story. But if the story means anything, I can tell you this about Adam and Eve, when they had fallen: they felt they had lost something.
Vara and me getting dressed that last morning. Just like every morning before it. You know the belts we wear: soft fiber-glass braid, joined to a shoulder halter, all in bright frank colors. We always dressed together when we waked, boys and girls, and Vara and I tied each other's belts on; A-Dzong and Haidee; Maria and Ted. Easy enough to get dressed one by one, in separate alcoves, Earth-style; but it was part of our life to do it together, in the middle of the room. Not really in pairs. During that quarter-hour after we waked up in the morning, each of the six would touch every other.
All day, every time one of the other Initials said to me, "Emilio," there was a joining which reached back in time to the waking together, and a feeling of the safe sleep before that. It was a feeling and poetry reaching farther. I never could have talked about it then because I had never had the experience of not having it. And who would I have needed to talk about it to?
We didn't have any feeling of impending loss, or savoring the last hour before you came. Just that the side of the room with the door was important. You know the six arms of the room, extending out from the central area in all three perpendicular directions. A lot of our "games," as you call them, use the six arms as a symmetrical "playing field," but now one arm was special. It was the first time anything important had ever been expected at the door.
I remember circling-four with Vara, A-Dzong, and Haidee, leaving a place in the middle for you, the unknown newcomer who wouldn't know how to "play"; Maria and Ted in fast trajectory toward us, down the two arms perpendicular to our circle; me taking the main push of Maria's momentum, A-Dzong most of Ted's, so the circle of four was set precessing.
"Emilio, how can he join that if he's not used to free-fall?"
"He just has to be at the center."
"But—he can't just be there, he has to…"
"I know," I said, but I didn't know how to finish.
The four of us touched down on alternating corners of the central well, while Maria and Ted bounced back to us from the ends of two of the corridor arms. They met and circled, facing the door. The rest of us came out, each spinning about the axis leading to the door; drifting slowly away from the door; watching the door. Oval of dull blue ceramic, the same as the surrounding wall, spinning in my field of view as I spun.
Ted said hollowly, "Frank Coglan," expressing our anticipation and making fun of it at the same time. We laughed lightly, uneasily.
A gentle chime said the intercom was now on, and Jay's voice said, "Frank Coglan's here, kids, he made the trip fine."
"Good."
"Maybe he's still a little bit rocky from free-fall, he's not really used to it yet—"
"No, I'm all right," we heard your voice on the intercom,
"Want to join them right away, Frank?"
"Sure."
We were together facing the door from the opposite end of the room. The door opened and we saw you, dressed in slacks, shirt, and harness-belts like ours.
"Hello," we said.
"Hi, kids," you said.
Then we laughed. Great way to get off on the right foot with the newcomer! Looking back, I see that none of our reactions was right. But after all—it was the first time we'd ever looked at a stranger's face and said hello. It was the first time we heard anybody but Ruth and Jay call us "kids." The situation was exciting, upsetting, and funny. It wasn't just the way you looked.
But it was that too. Here was a person in the room with us, the same size and age… but all flattened up! Your elbows held close in, touching your waist! Your chin in, almost touching your chest! Your legs and spine practically in a straight line! And staying still! To us it gave the irresistible impression that you were bound in an invisible hammock.
We laughed.
I guess we looked funny to you too. Had Ruth and Jay given you a look at us through a one-way window? I doubt it.
You just smiled and waited. You had been prepared for a shock, so you took it better-No, that's not the reason. We had been prepared too. I knew stories where the new kid was taunted by the neighborhood gang.
I said, "I'm sorry."
Then you laughed, offhand. "That's okay." You looked around, reached out a hand to steady yourself. (Steady yourself? Why? That's what we automatically said to ourselves. Why not just push off, stay in motion toward another wall?)
You said, "Gee, this room's so small."
"Small?" said A-Dzong. "Is it? How large are rooms in New York?"
"Oh, it's much bigger than most rooms, but my God, you've spent sixteen whole years here."
And we hung on that, evaluating our lives from your vantage. That was the conversation for a good hour. Fascinating, for us. "Prison!" you said at one point. I wonder what Ruth and Jay thought, listening on the intercom.
But you see what had happened? The new kid had become the boss, just like that. We've been just a bit off balance ever since, and you, with your lifetime of meeting new people and new places, have been more at home in our quadrant than we have. To him that has shall be given.
"How come you had to stay in here all by yourselves?" you asked.
A-Dzong said, "Well, you know what the plan was. Space travelers were always clumsy because in free-fall they kept their lifelong habits of moving in gravity. So we were the experiment of learning how to live in free-fall. The six of us were brought up here as infants, without any of this sitting and crawling and standing you do down on Earth. We just moved in what seemed the natural way. If we'd been able to see Ruth and Jay, we'd have copied their motions and not invented our own way."
"I know, I know, but to stay in this quadrant for sixteen years? Why wouldn't they let you out eventually, for God's sake?"
"We never asked them."
"Well," said Vara, "but they did say this: until we were nearly full-grown, there was danger that our habits wouldn't be fixed, and we'd lose the good of the experiment. Then the last few years they figured we needed to stay in familiar surroundings while we learned about society."
"Read books about the Earth, and so forth."
"You mean up till then you never had fairy tales or stories or anything?"
"Until we were eleven, that's right"
"They thought that might give us things to imitate too," added
A-Dzong, "and keep us from inventing out own ways. And it would have."
"Just Ruth and Jay talked with us. About the station, space flight, plenty of things. And we read. But not about how people act"
"Until you were eleven."
That's right. Even then, no illustrated books or movies."
"But didn't you want to go out into the other quadrants?"
"Well, we've been there a few hours at a time, because we couldn't learn the station thoroughly otherwise. Ruth and Jay stayed out of sight then."
"Didn't you ever want to see them?"
Vara said, "I guess free-fall isn't the only reason we're different from other kids."
I've thought a lot about that, Frank Coglan. Did Adam and Eve throw tantrums wanting to see Heaven? How big was the Garden, and did it matter to them?
That's a perfectly uninteresting question, isn't it: understanding the emotions of our childhood. What's interesting is understanding the common human condition, but we're just the Initials, only six of us, and our condition is peculiar to us. All that we're called on to do now is to teach you, and the others that are coming up, how to live in free-fall—and to fit into your social ways, since you can't accept ours, or even notice them except with impatience. Right?
Even with Vara, you'll always be setting the standard, never adapting to her. I can see.
I didn't notice at first that you were attracted to Vara.
"Sexually attracted" is an expression like "crowd" or "rainstorm" for us: We learned all the vocabulary because the great foreign Earth was an intricate marvel, but we weren't sure how any of it might apply to us. Our beautiful touching all day long we never called caresses. Our elaborate trajectories we never called dances.
Because the things the boots said with those Earth words didn't seem to describe us.
If you want to know if boys touched boys among us and girls touched girls, the answer is yes. But not at all as often as boys touched girls.
You don't know, because it was never natural after you came. Once, the second day, you laughed when you saw us all holding hands and called us a "daisy-chain." We were startled and drifted apart. You never made fun of us after that, but still we often stayed apart when inside we were aching for that contact. Our constraint came from the fact we couldn't include you, maybe. Or that we couldn't explain. Or maybe it was personal, Frank Coglan, to your own cocky self.
So there was this, which we couldn't put into irrelevant Earth vocabulary to tell you, and in our minds it was all mixed up with the way to live in free-fall, which we were trying to teach you,
Ruth suggested, "Teach him how you play ball," and that was good for a few hours. When each of us threw from the end of one of the arms, with three different balls (one for each perpendicular corridor), and you stood near the center and watched, you could begin to see why our posture might be efficient. And you could see how accurate a ball game in free-fall can be. I don't think any game on Earth calls for three small balls to meet in mid-air, for instance.
But it wasn't much of a success when you tried to join in. I mean, as a game. As a lesson, it was a success. You learned how different it feels to throw from mid-air or to throw pushing off from a wall; you began to get the feel of why we do almost everything with back arched and feet drawn up behind—and why we belay our belts to wall cleats for a lot of things, including throwing; you tried adapting your own throwing habits to our games.
That was the trouble: this was too good a hope, wasn't it, to be able to play catch. You know how to play catch. It was frustrating to find that, by our standards, you couldn't, and that's the only time I ever saw it really get to you.
Ruth's voice came soothing over the intercom again, "I've tried doing that their way too, Frank, and I don't think I'll ever learn. But you're young," very casually.
"I'll learn," you said, very determined.
Without the ball it was less frustrating. You had to learn out posture, which makes it possible at any moment to push off from a wall on any side. With your posture, what would you do if you drifted up to a wall back first? And you had to learn that one tumbles while in mid-air, back-somersault-ways, pretty constantly all day—just to remain conscious of what's around. Ruth and Jay aren't sure that's necessary, and I know you still find it dizzying, but all these habits which we developed before we were four may help in free-fall, and the more you pick up the better.
The fourth day you spent many hours trying direct trajectories the length of one of the arms. Trying to read something on the way, or to land on a particular spot—things like that. You were good-humored and maybe we were too condescending. (Just as we'd never had a friend, we'd never had a puppy.) But we were merry, and getting back to our old freedom. If you were ever going to fit into it, that was the day it would have had to begin.
Instead, that was the day you made a pass at Vara.
Is that the right term? It's never clear in the books what "make a pass" means concretely. She held your arm when you came up to her; your eyes glinted, you squeezed her arm back and smiled.
Less than we do—did—every day among ourselves? So much less. Why should I feel jealous? Sure, why should I feel jealous.
When we touched, we were just being ourselves. When I saw you squeeze Vara's arm, I was stunned with a word, "sex," big and ugly and jangling. All those other words followed it through my mind, and they weren't names for anything beautiful, the way good-hearted Earth authors tell adolescents. Just there was such a hot constriction of my throat…
And it kept on! I kept on thinking about it, watching you, not knowing what to do. I couldn't say anything about it to Vara or to any of the others.
That doesn't mean the relationship between the Initials could crumble to nothing at the first sight of an unfamiliar face. But when this struck…
Let's see if I can say what happened. Our whole daily life, everything we knew how to do and feel, had been among the six of us. In order to live at all we had to keep living the way we knew. What would you do if you suddenly had a thigh muscle paralyzed? You'd keep trying to walk in the old way, and get a little sick twinge as you canceled that no-longer-possible movement and began something self-conscious and poorer. Have you had that twinge from crossing our room or taking a drink of water in space, Frank Coglan? Well, for me, during those weeks, every response of my whole life gave me that twinge.
It would have been hard for you to be there and shut out of our relationship. But to have you there and superseding it… We hadn't imagined.
In my dreams you were metallic. Your skin was shiny gray, your eyes were pink and molten, and you neither saw nor thought. Awake, I could work and talk with you along with the others, even joke sometimes, but the image I had of you from my dreams never really disappeared. And I was miserable.
This was that whole period, I'm talking about, more than three weeks.
The fight was what freed us. I think it would have, even if Ruth and Jay hadn't overreacted the way they did.
You were asking us how we had got through infancy without seeing Ruth and Jay. That didn't annoy us, even me. We laughed. "It seems hard to change diapers without being seen, eh?"
"Yeah, what did they do, put anesthetic into the air supply?"
"No, they just—changed our diapers," grinned Maria. 'In the first place, we had harnesses like these on, and we were anchored pretty close all the time while we were still helpless. And then when we had to be handled, or put into hammocks to sleep—" She led the way to the end of one of the corridors. "Jay, would you show him?"
He said over the Intercom, "Just a second."
Maria pointed to a rubber diaphragm in a corner of the wall, and presently it bulged toward us, showing five spread fingers: Jay was reaching his arm through and the rubber made a glove for it. He wiggled his fingers. You were startled. You laughed. We, of course, had never seen his arm except this way.
You said to Jay, "Dr. Gercen, how many years since you and your wife have been on Earth?"
"Since the start of the project. Over sixteen years."
"Gee. Why did you ever decide to do that? I mean, nobody asked the Initials, they just took six orphan babies… but you had to decide."
You know I had never wondered that?
Jay said, "Well, Frank, you joined this program, you know, and you're going to be away from Earth for long spells too, I assure you.
"I hope I'm never all alone for sixteen years."
"We see the Initials every day."
"Yeah, but you know what I mean. And I sure hope I never have to change six pairs of diapers through a wall."
Jay laughed easily; but I looked quickly at your face and got a shock. That was another moment where some things we had read about personal relations suddenly turned out to apply to me. You were baiting me: I was supposed to get angry! If I'd thought of myself as somebody who could get angry, I probably would have light away.
Vara laughed too. There was a silence.
Your blue eyes slitted, you laughed through tight lips. "Especially stupes who never grow up." And you pushed off the wall, in the narrow corridor, toward me.
So I had to push you back when you collided with me, and the physical act was what made me able to be angry—not your silly remarks.
I pushed you. The other five had sped down to the other end of the corridor; I followed them as far as the central area, then caught a stanchion and swung back on you again. You didn't know what was hitting you. I didn't need experience fighting; I didn't even need room for maneuver. I always knew how to move to get where I wanted to be, while you were groping for something to hold onto.
You might say, you didn't know which side was up.
I hardly noticed the others. They laughed a little, in a terrified voice.
You said, "Don't hit a guy from behind!'' Of course I was. I'd push more than hit, just once or twice until reaction carried me away from you, then I'd come back in. You were helpless.
Would you have been willing to quit at that point? I didn't know how to stop any more than I'd known how to begin.
Coming back at you one more time, I was on guard only against the possibility of you hitting me. You were away from any wall, and racing the wrong way.
You caught my wrist in one hand. I hadn't thought of that. Pulling, you spun yourself around to face me, and your other hand grabbed my shoulder.
You shook me. I didn't know anyone could be so strong.
I was terrified. You didn't hurt me… Well, that hurt; it still hurts, to have been that scared.
You know who it was that saved me? I might as well tell you. It was Vara who came up behind you, grabbed your head, planted both feet, in the middle of your back, and pulled till you had to let go.
"Emilio!" Jay was calling me over the intercom. How long had he been calling?
You drifted free, your hands to your eyes, blinking to focus. When you looked, you saw us together in a corner, arms linked, staring at you. I was panting, and I got a little whiff of nausea with each breath.
"Emilio! Frank!" No alarm in Jay's voice. "Enough of that already. Listen, don't you think Frank's had enough just learning to maneuver? Let's start showing him around the station."
"Separate the brawling boys, Jay?" He chuckled. "You saw through me."
"For once. Jay, there's no need. We'll be all right." Jay was implacable. "Why don't Vara and I make a start of this—take a few days going through the layout of the station with him, the operation of the station, and so forth."
You answered something intelligent, but I was stunned. Vara and the Gercens showed you around the station together—not like our previous tours when Ruth and Jay had followed us, out of sight, and guided us by intercom.
So for the next two days I was tortured by an anxious feeling left over from the fight, of something unfinished and overdue. Resentment that you had taken Vara away from us. And I must admit, envy that Vara and not I was the first Initial to see Ruth and Jay face-to-face.
I don't know if I looked tortured. Unresponsive, anyway. Out of touch with A-Dzong and the others: I don't know whether any of them were feeling the same.
When I finally started whispering with them, I'm sure Ruth and Jay knew we were planning to ask for more of us to join you outside our quadrant. I don't think they could tell exactly what we were planning.
We worked it out together. But still without rapport; when I'd propose something I'd do it persuasively, speaking as if they'd of course agree, but feeling unsure the whole time. Between the Initials, it's not normal to have to be persuasive.
For the plan to work, Ruth and Jay had to misread our attitude. We asked for me to join you and Vara, and tried to sound like defiant adolescents in asking. Of course Ruth agreed.
We didn't ask to have the door of our room permanently unlocked (though she would have agreed to that too) because we didn't want her to detect too much unprecedented independence and take alarm. Maybe that wasn't the only motive. We enjoyed liberating ourselves.
Ruth let me out to join you and Vara; as I was leaving, Maria took advantage of the movements when the door was open to rig the lock.
It just takes a plastic tab on a yoke of fine wire, left in the lock when the door closes. You figure out things like this when you live in the same station all of your life and learn the operation of every pipe and circuit. Maria probably wasn't noticed doing this even if Ruth was looking right at her.
We had chosen a time when Jay would be asleep. Ruth seemed safer to deal with. Facing her, going down the corridor with her to join you, was anticlimax actually. After sixteen years of her omnipotence, and one day of scheming audacious rebellion, I saw her (white, round face and curly hair—quite a resemblance to Haidee, really—and she was so much smaller than me, it was hard not to laugh.
She holds her body the way you do. Of course. Something else, unexpected: she looks at me when she talks, as you do, and expects me to look at her. Hard to adjust to, when for all these years she's been for me a directionless voice on an intercom.
I felt awkward. At the end of the corridor, before we went into the solar battery service room where you and Vara were, I had to leave Ruth standing a few moments while I did a twisting spin in mid-air. "You make me dizzy," she said gently, but to me it was like stretching—getting back a necessary sense of freedom.
We came into the room with you and Vara. You were embarrassed, I think. Talk was strained, and the four of us kept a physical distance between us.
Then something happened which you may not understand. I said softly, "Culu, ekke." It was in our secret language. What children ever needed one more than we did? What I told her to do in that language, I knew Vara would be sure to do. We were out the door before you or Ruth had time even to turn around.
In another second the door was locked. Ignoring your calls, winking at Vara, I took about two minutes to jam the door so it would be very slow business to open from the inside. Something we had noticed months earlier; two lockers undipped from the wall are almost long enough to fill the corridor so the door won't open; to fill up the remaining centimeters, I pulled out a spare inflatable airlock section, crammed it into the gap, and inflated until it was wedged in good and tight.
I beckoned to Vara; we flew back along the corridor.
Over the intercom, Maria announced with glee, "Ruth and Frank are locked into the solar battery service room, and Jay, if you get out of your hammock you'll find that you're locked into your quarters. Don't worry. You know the Initials are perfectly able to run the station by ourselves. Well, we're taking a turn."
Then she turned the volume on the intercom way down, and the station was all ours. We stopped listening to you, the three of you. We didn't hear a word you said.
It was easy, but it felt good. It might have been still better if it hadn't been so easy… Say, if Jay had taken the precaution of skipping his regular sleeping shifty and kept an eye on us. Then the other four Initials would have had the gratification of surprising him.
We don't have many more facts about him and Ruth, just from having seen them; but our thinking about them is changed, like black-and-white to color, or flat photo to holography, now that we've had power over them. And now that we've been shaken up by you, who aren't tempted to regard the Gercens as the entire surrounding universe. We knew them all along, but now we can perceive them.
I can think about Ruth, locked in the room with you those hours right after we took over. I didn't listen in, but I know how she felt. She wasn't worried or shocked. She thought the rebellion was normal. She may even have been relieved.
I can imagine, now, that Ruth and Jay may have worried about this for years: what limits could they set us that we would refuse to observe? Or should they try to get us to squabble among ourselves? What would make us able to go after something we wanted, and make sure we got it?
They've devoted their lives to the Initials. We're their family, their friends, and their job. They raised us under conditions people aren't made to take—the isolation, I mean, more than the free-fall. And the project succeeded, eh? It produced the information about weightless living. But I don't think they'd have felt satisfied with their work if it had also produced six emotional cripples.
So excuse our prank. I know that when we turned up the intercom after your hours in lock-up, subjected you to a little unnecessary taunting, and then let you out, you were pretty impatient with us. Well, I'm likely to be working with you off and on the rest of my life, Frank Coglan, and we'll have to know how to deal with each other. I want you to understand.
It was no prank. I think it was important, if Initials' lives are important. None of us, even Ruth and Jay, knew how Initials grow up.
Point one, they need a serpent in their Garden. Thanks.
Point two, they don't need to draw blood—at least, not if their "parents" have been like Ruth and Jay—but they do need to take power.
We learned something else about what happens to six kids who touch each other every day and never see anyone else.
Frank Coglan, Vara didn't tell me, but I know you and she had made it together the night before.
Frank Coglan, here's point three. During the hours that the Initials had control of the station, I tried to make love with Vara. Tried to. It's not a question of her being willing—I mean, she's
Vara and I'm Emilio, there's no such thing as one of us refusing the other. We tried to, and we couldn't make it.
She's for you, Frank Coglan. If you and she want it that way. You won't have competition from me, or A-Dzong, or Ted.
Just the other day I overheard Ruth saying something to Jay involving the word "exogamy." Maybe they understand us better than we understand ourselves, again.
Certainly when little Diann came to the station a couple of days later, there was something new. Incredible. She can be just as clumsy as she wants to, with her Earthside posture; she's beautiful, her awkwardness is beautiful, everything's part of it It doesn't matter if I pity her when she has trouble catching on to space life. It doesn't matter if I envy her her Earth childhood. Just everything's okay. I laugh into her eyes, and tingle with anticipation waiting for her to laugh back at me, and right away she laughs back and by the time she does I'm crying.
Diann is for me.
Just the same, there will always be that deep-glowing backdrop to everything in my life, that peaceful kingdom in which we flowered. It's not there for you; not for Diann. It will always be there for me and Vara, and we can't give it to you. You'll never know, Frank Coglan.