Tau Zero

He turned to go. “Captain—” Reymont attempted.

“Not now,” Telander said. His legs scissored across the deck.

“But—”

“The answer is no.” Telander vanished out the door.

Reymont stood where he was, head lowered and shoulders hunched as if to charge. But he had nowhere to go. Ingrid Lindgren regarded him for a time that shivered — a minute or more, ship’s chronology, which was a quarter hour in the lives of the stars and planets — before she said, very softly, “What did you want of him?”

“Oh.” Reymont fell into a normal posture. “His order to recruit a police reserve. He gave me something stupid about my not trusting my fellows.”

Their eyes clashed. “And not letting them alone in what may be their final hours,” she said. It was the first occasion since their breach that they had stopped addressing each other with entire correctness.

“I know.” Reymont spat out his words. “There’s little for them to do, they think, except wait. So they’ll spend the time … talking; reading favorite poems; eating favorite foods, with an extra wine ration, Earthside bottles; playing music, opera and ballet and theater tapes, or in some cases something livelier, maybe bawdier; making love. Especially making love.”

“Is that bad?” she asked. “If we must go out, shouldn’t we do so in a civilized, decent, life-loving way?” “By being a trifle less civilized, et cetera, we might increase our chance of not going out.”

“Are you that afraid to die?”

“No. I simply like to live.”

“I wonder,” she said. “I suppose you can’t help your crudeness. You have that kind of background. What about your unwillingness to overcome it, though?”

“Frankly,” he answered, “having seen what education and culture make people into, I’m less and less interested in acquiring them.”

The spirit gave way in her. Her eyes blurred, she reached out toward him and said, “Oh, Carl, are we going to fight the same old fight over again, now in what’s maybe our last day alive?” He stood rigid. She went on, fast: “I loved you. I wanted you for my life’s partner, the father of my children, whether on Beta Three or Earth. But we’re so alone, all of us, here between the stars. We have to give what kindness we can, and take it, or we’re worse than dead.”

“Unless we can control our emotions.”

“Do you think there was any emotion … anything but friendship, and wanting to help him get over his hurt, and — and a wish to make sure he did not fall seriously in love with me — with Boris? And the articles state, in as many words, we can’t have formal marriages en route, because we’re too constricted and deprived as is—”

“So you and I terminated a relationship which had become unsatisfactory.”

“You made plenty of others!” she flared.

“For a while. Till I found Ai-Ling. Whereas you’ve taken to sleeping around again.”

“I have normal needs. I’ve not settled down … committed myself” — she gulped — “like you.”

“Nor I, except that one does not abandon a partner when the going gets bad.” Reymont shrugged. “No matter. As you implied, we’re both free individuals. It wasn’t easy, but I’ve finally convinced myself it’s not sensible or right to carry a grudge because you and Fedoroff exercised that freedom. Don’t let me spoil your fun after you go off watch.”

“Nor I yours.” She brushed violently at her eyes.

“As a matter of fact, I’ll be occupied till nearly the last minute. Since I wasn’t allowed to deputize, I’m going to ask for volunteers.”

“You can’t!”

“I wasn’t actually forbidden. I’ll brace a few men, in private, who’re likely to agree. We’ll constitute ourselves a stand-by force, alerted to do whatever we can that’s needed. Do you mean to tell the captain?”

She turned from him. “No,” she said. “Please go away.”

His boots clacked off down the corridor.

Chapter 8

Everything that could be done had been. Now, spacesuited, strapped into safety cocoons that were anchored to the beds, the folk of Leonora Christine waited for impact. Some left their helmet radios on so they could-talk with their roommates; others preferred solitude. With head secured, no one could see another, nor anything except the bareness above his faceplate.

Reymont and Chi-Yuen’s quarters felt more cheerless than most. She had stowed away the silk draperies that softened bulkheads and overhead, the low-legged table she had made to hold a Han Dynasty bowl with water and a single stone, the scroll with its serene mountainscape and her grandfather’s calligraphy, the clothes, the sewing kit, the bamboo flute. Fluorolight fell bleak on unpainted surfaces.

They had been silent awhile, though their sets were tuned. He listened to her breath and the slow knocking of his own heart. “Charles,” she said finally.

“Yes?” He spoke with the same quietness.

“It has been good with you. I wish I could touch you.”

“Likewise.”

“There is a way. Let me touch your self.” Taken aback, he had no ready reply. She continued: “You have always held most of you hidden. I don’t imagine I’m the first woman to tell you so.”

“You aren’t.” She could hear the difficulty he had saying it.

“Are you certain you weren’t making a mistake?”

“What’s to explain? I’ve scant use for those types whose chief interest is their grubby little personal neuroses. Not in a universe as rich as this.”

“You never mentioned your childhood, for instance,” she said. “I shared mine with you.”

He snorted out a kind of mirth. “Consider yourself spared. The Polyugorsk low-levels weren’t nice.”

“I’ve heard about conditions there. I never quite understood how they came about.”

“The Control Authority couldn’t act. No danger to world peace. The local bosses were too useful in too many ways to higher national figures to be thrown out. Like some of the war lords in your country, I imagine, or the Leopards on Mars before fighting got provoked. A lot of money to be had in the Antarctic, for those who didn’t mind gutting the last resources, killing the last wildlife, raping the last white wilderness—” He stopped. His voice had been rising. “Well, that’s all behind us. I wonder if the human race will do any better on Beta Three. I rather doubt it.”

“How did you learn to care about such things?” she asked mutedly.

“A teacher, to begin with. My father was killed when I was young, and by the time I was twelve, my mother had nearly finished going down the drain. We had this one man, however, Mr. Melikot, an Abyssinian, I don’t know how he ended up in our hellhole of a school, but he lived for us and for what he taught, we felt it and our brains came awake… I’m not certain if he did me a favor. I got to thinking and reading, and that got me into talking and doing, and that got me into trouble till I had to skip for Mars, never mind how… Yes, I suppose it was a favor in the long run.”

“You see,” she said, smiling in her helmet, “it isn’t hard to take off a mask.”

“What do you mean?” he demanded. “I’m trying to oblige you, no more.”

“Because we may soon be dead. That tells me something about you also, Charles. I begin to see the why of things, the man behind them. Why they say you were honest but tight-fisted with money in the Solar System, to name a trivial detail. Why you’re often gruff, and never try to dress well though it would look good on you, and hide that possessiveness of yours behind a ‘Go your own way if you don’t want to go mine’ that can be really freezing, and—”

“Hold on! A psychoanalysis, from a few elementary facts about when I was a kid?”

“Oh no, no. That would be ridiculous, I agree. But a bit of understanding, from the way you told them. A wolf in search of a den.”

“Enough!”

“Of course. I’m happy that you — No further, not ever again, unless you want.” Chi-Yuen’s figure of speech evidently lingered in her consciousness, for she mused: “I miss animals. More than I expected. We had carp and songbirds in my parents’ house. Jacques and I had a cat in Paris. I never realized till we traveled this far, how big a part of the world the rest of the animal creation is. Crickets in summer nights, a butterfly, a hummingbird, fish jumping in me water, sparrows in a street, horses with velvet noses and warm smell — Do you think we will find anything like Earth’s animals on Beta Three?”