Damocles (21 page)

Without realizing it, they had formed a loose circle once again, facing each other. Prader spit out a muddy wad into a
puddle at her feet and all of them laughed. With the rain gone, the rumble of machinery could be heard once more, as well as the mumbling and hum of the Dideto work crews watching them from under the awnings. Jefferson pulled a twig from his matted hair. “Good luck explaining this to them, Meg.”

Meg unbuckled her wrist screen, wiping away the muddy grit that had collected beneath it. The screen was undamaged—they were designed to go through a lot worse than mud wrestling—but she hesitated to activate the coms. She knew Loul couldn’t hear them. None of the Dideto could, and for just a moment longer, she savored the privacy. It wouldn’t last, she knew. She had to face Loul. Their little mud show wouldn’t be enough to distract him from what he’d been trying to say to her earlier. He knew she was lying. She knew she would continue.

The Effans sounded like they would break their knuckles, they typed so fast taking notes on the bizarre behavior of the Urfers. Mamu, the archivist, found a tarp to cover his camera sufficiently to get some footage that would probably never see the light of day since there was nobody who could think of a way to describe to the public what they were seeing. Seeing it themselves, the crews still couldn’t believe it. Kik and his crew thought at first they were trying to kill each other and then trying to kill themselves, but when they kept getting back up, all those white teeth the only thing showing though the masks of mud, the crews had no choice but to accept that for some reason the Urfers were enjoying this.

For the first time since arriving on the site, Loul didn’t care. He saw Meg laughing even though he couldn’t hear her over the pounding of rain on the awning. He saw her grinning and happy,
inexplicably throwing herself again and again into the mud in that bizarre flying-on-the-ground way they did. He saw the cuts and tears in her skin and the red blood weeping to the surface and washing away in the downpour, but he didn’t feel the urge to rush out and comfort her or bandage her the way the Effans so wanted to do for Cho. And when they all stopped one at a time and turned their faces up to let the waning rain wash the mud from their skins, when they turned their backs on the work crews sheltered beneath the awnings to stand in a circle together, Loul felt farther from Meg than he had since first laying eyes on her.

It figured it would rain. Loul hated the rain, always had. He hated it more than the average city dweller, more than even his parents who lived close to the river and always feared the rain’s flood. He hated the sound of it and the smell of it and the way it made the light milky and dim. Most of all he hated the way it drowned out all the sounds around him, making him hear only the sounds in his head. It never failed. It always rained when things went wrong.

The administration was lying to the media. The media was lying to the public. By not saying anything when that reporter from The Searcher had been dragged from the press conference, he had lied to the world. He had lied to his friends, Po and Hark and Reno Dado; he had lied to his family. He had lied to himself. The worst part of all of that was that he could live with it. He could live with the fact that people lied and fudged the truth and omitted facts for whatever expediency they could rationalize. He didn’t expect any better. What hurt the most, what made the rain feel like it was crashing down like gravel on his skull, was that Meg had lied. Meg was still lying and maybe it was adolescent of him, but he wanted, no, he needed to believe these Urfers, these aliens who had made it all the way across the stars had reached a point in evolution where they didn’t need to lie. He wanted them
to be better than him, better than the Dideto. He wanted them to have their own version of those old oaths in the Magagan comics he’d read as a boy.

The rain tapered off, the drips and pings still splattering mud under the awnings. Crews began uncovering work kits and tools, considering ways to keep the equipment out of the mud, discussing the fear that the Urfers wouldn’t help since they clearly had an affection for the gunk. Loul stayed where he sat, at his and Meg’s booth. Mamu had piled some lenses and cables on the table and Loul made no move to clear them. He didn’t know how he was going to get through these next few minutes, much less these next days, weeks, and months until whatever the Urfers had planned, whatever secret they were keeping, came to light.

He wanted to go home. Security had given the crews permission to access their cell phones, all of them retrieving dozens of panicked messages from loved ones. The administration had sent messages to their families assuring everyone that the work crews were safe and well, working on a classified mission. When the news of the aliens had broken, the majority of Loul’s messages were from Po and Hark, well, Hark with Po yelling in the background. He knew they were excited for him. They thought the way he had thought—that he was on the cutting edge of the greatest event in Didet history. They would have seen him on the press conference. They would have seen him lie.

Meg scraped her boot on a board outside the awning, clearing a thick wedge of mud from each sole before wiping her feet on the sheltered grass. She had a towel draped across her shoulders, her skin pale and spotted against the brief black harness-like shirt that covered her small breasts. He’d never seen her stomach before. The movement of the dripping water caught the light, making the soft, flat plane of muscle look like glass. Her hair, normally floating around her face in fuzzy tendrils, lay flat
against her skull, shining and damp, tamed in the elastic band at the back of her neck. When she slid into the booth across from him he saw she still had mud beneath her transparent fingernails and a smudge of dirt beneath her chin.

Around them, the Urfers were laughing, slapping their crews’ backs and chattering words the Dideto couldn’t understand, but they laughed along anyway. The spirit under the awning was light if slightly bewildered. Crews hauled boards and tarps out onto the work site to cover the worst of the mud pits, marveling at the grace with which the long-legged aliens navigated the slippery terrain. The black-clad official crews hung back, not quite willing to soil their expensive uniforms, but the original work crews made do as best they could. Soon everyone was getting back into the routine of their work except Meg and Loul.

She pushed aside a ring of cable and carefully packed the heavy lenses within the ring. Loul stared at her, not helping, not moving, watching her face and catching the guarded glances she threw his way now and then. She took longer than necessary to clear the spot in front of them, her face still and lowered. Then she folded her hands in front of her, her long fingers interlacing with that ease that still sent a thrill through him.

“Loul.” She spoke loudly enough to hear her without the earpiece. She used her own voice, not activating the translation com. The word sounded like wind through the water reeds when she said it and he wished she’d turn on the coms. He even pointed to her wrist screen. He didn’t want to fall under her spell again. He wondered if she really could use some kind of magic to enthrall him. Right now, after the rain, after the lie, he wanted to see her with some sort of detachment, some sort of prejudice that he hadn’t seen her with yet. He didn’t want to lean in to catch the bell-like sound of her voice or watch the way the light played pink and orange on her skin, picking up
the small brown flecks that broke up the smooth surface, visible only when he sat very close to her. He wanted to see her with different eyes. He wanted to see her the other way she was—tall and pale and flimsy and weird. Alien. If it turned out the secret she kept from him was dangerous, he wanted to have the thoughts in place to protect himself.

She pulled the screen out, laying it flat against the table. A few jabs at the symbols and he could hear her in his ear once again. She didn’t say anything but he could hear her breath when she sighed and the brush of the towel as she squeezed water from the rope of hair that hung down her neck. “Loul,” she said, still in her own voice. It was the only word she could say in his language. His own voice took over her words. “Meg need/want…” She didn’t finish the sentence even though he saw her mouth moving. Before the earpiece he would have thought she was talking in that silent way. Instead it looked like she was trying on words but couldn’t find one to come out. He knew how she felt.

“Meg.” He looked at the screen, wishing he could read it, wishing she had designed it so he too could pick out words amid the red blocks of symbols. “Loul need/want talk. Loul give word to Meg—trust. Yes?”

He heard her swallow and saw the muscles in her thin neck move. “Yes.”

“Trust is ask question and talk answer. Answer is good/okay, not bad/no good. This is trust. Yes?” He finally lifted his gaze to meet hers. Maybe it was the light filtering through the post-rain haze but her eyes seemed shinier than usual, almost brilliant. “Trust is Loul need/want answer, Meg has answer, Meg talks. Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Loul need/want answer. Meg talk?” He stared at her, waiting. “No?”

When she still said nothing, he looked back at the screen. “Meg show Loul word
trust
here. Where is
trust
?” Meg pointed to a slim red box near the bottom right corner. Loul made the settling stance, making sure she saw him. He placed his hand on the box for trust. Being sure she followed his hands, he pressed it again and then slowly and deliberately moved his hand to a button he knew and pressed. “No.”

Meg covered her face with her hands, blinking hard to keep the tears from spilling out over her lashes. She didn’t need the language screen to know what Loul was saying. She could see it on his face, in his eyes, the way his third lid kept creeping into sight as if it could protect him from the pain she knew she was causing him. She didn’t know exactly what happened at that press conference but the translator had picked up enough to give her a pretty good idea.

The Dideto wanted to know if there were more Earthers coming. It seemed like the reporter who’d been dragged out of the press conference had been demanding an answer to that. Baddo had given a reply that the translator was still working on but the gist of it seemed to be that the people in charge had come to their own conclusions about the answer. Whatever that conclusion was, it made Loul unhappy and tense. She could hear it in the thrum of his throat. Even worse, she could hear the change in that pitch when he looked at her, when he had asked her directly, more directly than he had asked her anything up to this point, and she had pretended to not understand.

Now her newest word,
trust
, was being used to let her know that he was on to her. He knew she was lying and she could
only imagine the nightmares he was dreaming up to explain the lie. Of course, she couldn’t use those words, could she? Did they dream? They didn’t sleep, but when they dropped, did they dream? Would they even know what nightmares were? For one stupid moment she actually considered resettling and starting to broach that topic. Stupid, she knew, because if they didn’t get across this hurdle, they might as well bring in Baddo to do the translating. The bond was straining between them and it was her fault.

But how could she tell him? How do you explain to people who have never seen the blackness of space, who have never left the gravity of their own world and thrown themselves into the upside-down reality of interstellar travel that some things were just not spoken of? If it had taken this long to learn the word for trust, how long would it take to teach the word for superstition? Because that’s what it was, a superstition, and they all knew it. But when you stake your life on the stability of an improbable and unstable propulsion system to catapult yourself beyond the known edges of your universe because you’re following the ancient message of strangers who might be your ancestors, you didn’t have to be a psychologist to see why people clung to small comforts and less than logical assurances.

It was one of the oddest reasons Meg felt at home among deep-space travelers. In the beginning of her career, she had stuck to the inner colonies, those stops within the terraforming ring that were reached with traditional transport ships. The voyages took weeks or even months, but the ships were well appointed and safety records so unbroken nobody even bothered to consider the dangers. But as her career had progressed and her reputation had grown, she’d been compelled to strike out farther, to the outer colonies and the experimental stations where international and cultural tensions ran high.

Her first trip to what was then the deepest of the deep-space stations, Excelsior, had made her so nervous that she’d been tranquilized to the point of stupidity by the ship’s med team. She remembered trying to sneak in a lucky nickel her grandmother had given her as a child, terrified the security team would find it and strip it from her. As carefully as they had scanned her bags and body for unnecessary and dangerous metals and weights before departure, she’d been stunned when she’d gotten to her cubby and found the nickel in the pocket where she’d left it. Of course she couldn’t hold it during deep sleep, but when she’d come out of stasis, the first thing she did was pull that nickel out and squeeze it, thanking it for her safe arrival.

That first trip was where she saw how deep-space travelers really worked. The men and women on these crews were the bravest of the sailors, the biggest risk takers, the most prepared for any type of emergency. They were the innovators, the pioneers, the Magellans of space travel. These pilots made enormous amounts of money they never spent on anything except more travel, their timeline so out of sync with their planet-bound families and friends that they tended to seek out only each other for company. As her job took her farther and farther into the reaches of human space, she came to feel at home among the deep spacers. Not because she had even a fraction of their knowledge of physics or engineering or navigational computation but because when all the computations had been completed and the limitations of physics were under control, she saw these men and women pull out their pendants and their fetishes and their touchstones and keepsakes and prayer cards.