Beyond the Farthest Suns (7 page)

“Not yet,” he said.

“Well, you'd better find one.”

“OK,” he said. He took both trays and left, standing in the door frame for a moment, as he had stood before. “You'll be all right, Karen?” His questions were curiously accented in the middle, as though each query were half a statement of fact.

“Yes,” she said.

He went to find a cabin and get some sleep.

When Alista came awake, he shut off the net that had held him in place during the night and kept him warm in the mesh pajamas he'd borrowed. He put everything in its place as though the occupant would be back soon. He had chosen the first officer's cabin, feeling more comfortable in the room of a man who had faced risks as his official duty. If such a man's time came in such a meaningless way, that was his gamble.

A passenger's cabin would have made Alista nervous.

He found Karen in the lounge cleaning up the scattered cards and taking out the spilled nail polish with solvent. “Damn,” she said. “It eats the carpet, too.”

“Do you want breakfast?” he asked.

“I've fixed some already,” she said.

“I'll get some more myself then.”

“Yours is all ready. It's in the warmer.”

“Thank you.” Looking around the compartment, he com­mented that it looked better and she shrugged.

“You put them all outside?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Why?”

“You know.” He looked at her sternly. She looked away and took a deep breath.

When he had finished his food he tapped the orange lump with his finger and it came to life, protruding eyes on stalks and waving palps. “Ever seen anything like Jerk before?”

Karen shook her head. She didn't want to look at it, or ask any questions, or have it explained to her.

“When I get back from the control room I'll tell you about Jerk. I'm going to shut down the computer and cut the servos. We lose a little battery power each time they switch on the engine pumps.”

“You stopped the fuel feed?” she asked.

“I did,” Alista said, taking hope from the un­prompted question.

He checked the ship's position by shooting the sun rising over the bloated arc of Hesperus and taking an angle from distant bright Sirius. Comparing his findings with the computer, the ma­chine followed his calculations to three figures. The ship's brains weren't scrambled, then. He threw out his own paper and questioned the guidance systems about their position and orbital velocity.

Their speed was increasing. They were approaching Perihesperon. In a few minutes they'd make their first pass through the lunar belt at—he checked the readout—twenty-two thousand kilo­meters per hour. At that velocity it would be useless to try to dodge moonlets with the ship's maneuvering and docking engines.

He didn't feel old, watching the planets fill the screen. He didn't feel very old at all, but then he couldn't sense the breakdown of his cells either. Flexing his arms, stretching his legs to increase circulation, he felt like a young man, not at all ready to give up.

Something dark blotted out the planet for the blink of an eye. Then a sharply defined scatter of chunks went past. A haze of dust made the ship tremble and buck.

They were through. First passage.

He returned to the lounge, practicing smiles and wiping them away as they inevitably approached fatuousness.

“Hey!” he said. “I'm going to tell you about Jerk, hm?”

She nodded.

“I picked him up from a dealer on Tau Ceti's Myriadne. He—it—whatever, comes from a place where the air is so bad nothing can breath it, so he breaks down silicates for his oxygen. He eats plants that absorb his own kind when they're dead, and the whole thing …” he indicated the ecological pattern with a circling finger, “…means that no animal kills another animal to survive. So he's docile and smart …” He stopped and didn't feel like saying anything more, but he finished the sentence, “because he absorbs from your own personality, so he's as smart as his owner.”

Karen was looking at the spot the solvent had made on the carpet.

“He, she, it, doesn't matter,” Alista said. “Jerk doesn't care.”

“Did something happen to you?” she asked. “I mean, when you came near the ship.”

Alista felt like a small child who wanted to say some­thing, but couldn't. He was eighty years old and he felt so much like a child that he wanted to find a sympathetic breast and weep. But he was a man long used to death, and finding a frightened weakness in himself made him more reluctant to say or do anything.

“Yes,” he said.

“Bad?”

“Yes.”

“You're going to die?”

“Yes, dammit! Be quiet. Don't say anything.”

And he turned to walk out. A day, two days. That was all.

How long did she have?

The second passage through the belt went smoothly. Alista investigated the emergency shields to see what they could repel. They could absorb and transfer impacts from anything up to nine tons. But the shields required safeties to activate them and a guidance system to pinpoint their maximum force on the approaching object. Neither were in working order.

Karen stayed to herself, read­ing fitfully or trying to sleep, and he stayed in the bridge cabin, idly searching all possible avenues of escape.

If he didn't tell her and she died by surprise, would that be less cruel than telling her? Alista wasn't a religious man, but his Polynesian heritage still impressed him with the idea that dignity and a certain courage in facing one's end led to better relations in the afterlife.

Relations to what, he couldn't say—he'd long since stopped speculating about things after death. Death was merely the final solving of mysteries, one way or another.

Karen broke out of her pose of deep sorrow when the idea came to her that she wasn't going to survive. She couldn't shake it because she could visualize nothing beyond the walls of the crippled ship. She went to Alista on the bridge and again the uncomfortable waiting for words began.

Alista spoke first, adjusting his seat and manufacturing an excuse to concentrate on the controls. “I thought you were asleep.”

“Couldn't.”

“It would be good if you could get some rest.”

“I've been sleeping for hours,” she said. “I have more questions.”

“Ask away,” Alista said.

“What's going to keep the rescue ship from getting here?”

“Nothing.”

“Don't lie to me!” she said, indignant. “I'm not a little girl.”

“I see,” he said. He wanted to ask,
And have you had lovers and children, and lost people you loved and under­stood with the grace of your own years what they lost by dying
?

“It's filthy,” she said, “just filthy, not telling me what's going to happen.”

“I don't want to make you unhappy.”

“I'm not a child,” she said softly, evenly.

Alista lifted the shoulder with Jerk on it and patted the orange lump, head cocked to one side. “You may make it. You'll last longer than I will, anyway. But more than likely the ship will hit a rock in the belt of moonlets and everything will go …” He made a whoosh with lips and slapped his palms together.

“It will?”

He nodded.

“Goodbye to all, then.”

“Hello to what?” he grinned.

“Where are you from?” she asked, and he told her. He talked for a few minutes, telling of old Earth, where she'd never been, of Molokai in a group of islands in a big ocean, of schools and brown children and going away to seek the stars.

She spoke of her schools on Satiyajit, and the boy friend who waited for her, and of her parents. When she could find nothing more to say, she told him how little she had really seen. She was surprised to find she had no more self-pity, only a deep well of honesty which told her all the sad, sad pressure in her gut was something human, of course, but of no use to anybody, least of all her.

They ate dinner together in silence. Alista's face was more relaxed, lines untensed, and his cheeks less wrinkled. But he grew visibly more pale and weaker.

Alone in his cabin, he vomited up his food and slept fitfully, sweating, on the floor, wrapped in a curtain un­hooked from the lounge wall. He couldn't stand the form­less comfort of the net.

“Let's be a little happy,” Karen said when the sleep period was over and she met Alista in the hall around the gymnasium. “Can you make the music play?” He said he could, but he was too weak to dance. “Then let me dance for you,” she said. “You won't mind?”

He could hardly mind. She slipped on blue tights and pulled her hair into a long braid, putting a round white cap on her head. With a clapper in one hand and a bell in the other, she showed him a smooth ballet to or­chestrated concréte sounds.

She moved in slow motion in the low gravity, but when she finished her breath came in heavy gasps. Her face, flushed with exertion, showed no awareness of the upcoming third passage.

Alista put himself to bed an hour later and took a small drink of water from a cup brought by Karen. With the weakening of his blood, his face was pale; with the failure of his liver, it was turning yellow.

He asked her to get him the kit from the medical officer's cabin and she did so. When she came back he saw she'd been crying and he asked her why.

“I can't hold it back,” she said. “I just wish I was never born, to have to feel like I do now. It's all so damned use­less! I haven't seen or done anything, anything at all!”

“A little while ago you said you weren't a little child. Do you still think that?”

“No,” she said. “I feel like I've just been born.”

“Would you like to hear a story?” he asked. “Maybe it'll make both of us feel better.”

“All right,” she said.

“I was a gigolo once, a long time ago, and do you know whom I was a gigolo to?” Karen shook her head, no. “I was a consort to Baroness Anna Sigrid-Nestor.”

“You knew her?” Karen asked, not quite believing. Anna Sigrid Nestor had been the richest woman in the galaxy, with her control of Dallat Enterprises, the third largest Economische.

“I did. I knew her for three years, the last three years of her life. She was a hundred and fifty years old and she was an abstainer. She didn't use juvenates because—well, I never did find out exactly why, but even when her doctor told her she was going to die soon, she refused them. She also refused prosthetics and trans­plants.

“The last year, I couldn't be her gigolo any more. She finally gave that up.” He smiled at the woman's per­severance and Karen managed a grin of half-understand­ing. “But I stayed on her ship. She liked to talk with me. Everybody else was too scared to come near her. She kept me on her flagship until she died.” He stopped to regain his breath.

“That damned old woman, do you know what she had planned for her funeral? She was going to have her body sealed in a sublight ship and shot into a protostar in the Orion nebula. She thought she could radiate throughout the galaxy then and be immortal that way.

“A few weeks before she died, with the flagship warping to the nebula, she realized what she was doing. She was contradicting her own beliefs. She wanted to call it off. But she hadn't been thinking too well, she'd been getting senile—though I hadn't noticed—and she had ordered that all the ship's officers be fired without benefits if the original mission wasn't fulfilled.

“It was very sad. Nobody would listen to her. Now she wanted to be buried like everybody else of her faith, without pretension, and she couldn't. She told me and I tried to fight the officers, but they wouldn't budge. They said there was no way out for them. I think maybe they were taking a little revenge on her for years of … Well, she was a strong woman.”

“That's horrible,” Karen said.

Alista nodded. “We were all waiting for her to die, and you know what I began to do? Me, tough old Cammis Alista, I swore I'd never let myself get so involved with another woman again. You know, she was ugly and wrinkled and her breasts were dry and flat, but what she'd
been
and
done
; when she was dying, I loved her for those things. And I wanted to make her live. But there was no way out.” He swallowed. “I talked with her just like you and I are talking now, and she told me why she had never wanted to live forever.

“‘Alista,' she said, ‘there's something very odd about living. It's not how long you live, not how long a bird flies, but how high you reach and what you learn when you get there. Just like a bird that flies as high as it can, and only does it once before going too near the sun. Think of the glory it must feel to go closer than anyone else!'”

He closed his eyes to rest. They were pink with ruptured vessels. “I asked her, ‘What if we never get near the sun at all?' And she said that none of us ever do, really, but we have to work to make ourselves think that way. To think that we really do. She said, ‘When I last saw the sun, the sun I was born under, it was something I didn't even pay attention to. I didn't care about it. When I last saw the Earth I was rich and young and it didn't matter to me that I might never come back.'

“The doctor kicked me out of her room before she died. But she wrote a note later. When I read it she was dead and they had just shot her off into the protostar cluster.”

“What was the note?” Karen asked.

“A poem. I don't know who wrote it, maybe she did. But it said, ‘When last I saw my final sun, I was cold and didn't mind the dark. But now, so near, my chill needs your warmth, and I cry for the warmth denied, the dark to come. I want to sing more, say more words, love again.' That was all she wrote.”

“Do you know what she meant?”

“No,” Alista said. “I took juvenates like everybody else. I didn't want to die as she had. When she was gone there was nothing left. A little bit of the dark world came in after her, and she didn't even come to my dreams.”