Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (27 page)

Ignoring the footfalls pattering behind, she lets her mind go back pleasurably to the great breakfasts she’s had. All the sunrise views, how she loves that. Like the morning on the old Ohio Turnpike, when all the owls hooted at once, and the mists turned pink and rose up and there was the shining river all spread out below her. Beautiful. Even with the mosquitoes. If you’re going to appreciate life, you can’t let little things like mosquitoes bother you. . . . That was before her peculiar sickness, when she was at the hostel. So many good hostels she’s stopped at, all the interesting different settlements and farms, all the great sister-people. Someday she’ll do the whole west route, know people everywhere. . . . Pad-pad-pad, she hears them again momentarily, rubs away a tiny ache in her temple.
Boo
, she chuckles to herself, feeling her bare feet falling sturdy and swift, left-and-a-right-and-a-left, carrying her over the miles, across the free beautiful friendly Earth. O my sisters, living in light!

Pictures flit through her head, all the places she wants to visit. The Western mountains, the real big ones. And the great real Sea. Maybe she’ll visit the grave of the Last Man when she’s out there, too. That would be interesting. See the park where he lived, hear the tapes of his voice and all. Of course he probably wasn’t the actually last Man, just the one they knew about. It would be really something to hear such a different person’s voice.

Pad-pad-pad-louder, closer than before. They’re going to be a nuisance if they follow her up the ramp and hang around her breakfast.

“Boo!” she shouts, laughing, swinging around at them. They scatter so fast she can barely glimpse dark shapes vanishing into the old walls. Good. “Boo!” she shouts again, sorry to have to drive them away, and swings back on course, satisfied.

The buildings are beside her now, but they’re pretty intact, no glass she can see underfoot. In fact, the glass is still in the old store windows here. She glances in curiously as she passes, heaps of moldy stuff and faded pictures and printing. “Ads.” Lots of sisters’ faces, all looking so weird and fake-grinning. One window has nothing but dummy heads in it, all with strange-looking imitation hair or something on them. Fantastic.

—But here they come again behind her, pad-pad-pad, and she really ought to discourage them before they decide to stick with her up the freeway.

“Boo, boo! No—” Just as she’s turning on them, something fast and dark springs and strikes or snaps at her arm! And before she can react she sees they are suddenly all around her, ahead of her—rearing up weirdly, just like people!

“Get
out!”
she shouts, feeling a rush of something unknown—anger?—sending heat through her, this is almost like one of the dreams! But hardness strikes her neck, staggers her, with roaring in her ears.

She hits out awkwardly, feels herself slammed down on concrete—pain—her head is hurt. And she is striking, trying to fend them off, realizing unbelieving that the brutes are tugging at her, terribly strong, pulling her legs and arms apart, spread-eagling her.

“Sisters!” she shouts, really being hurt now, struggling strongly. “
Sisters!
Help!” But something gags her so that she can only choke, while she feels them tearing at her clothes, her belly.
No, no
—she understands with horror that they really are going to bite her, to eat her flesh, and remembers from somewhere that wild dogs tear out the victim’s guts first.

A great wave of anger convulses her against their fangs, she knows this is a stupid accident, a mistake—but her blood is fountaining everywhere, and the pain, the
pain!
All in a moment she is being killed, she knows now she is going to die here.

—But as a truly terrible agony cuts into her crotch and entrails, she sees or thinks she sees—yes!—in the light, in the patches of sky between the terrible bodies of her attackers, she can see them coming—see far off but clear the beautiful faces of her sisters speeding to save her, to avenge her! O my sisters, yes—it will be all right now, she knows, choking in her blood. They will finish these animals. And my knapsack, my messages—somewhere inside the pain and the dying she knows it is all right, it will be all fixed when they get here; the beloved sisters will save her, this is just an accident—and soon she, or someone like her, will be going on again, will be footing over the wide free Earth, courier to Des Moines and points west—

HOUSTON, HOUSTON, DO YOU READ?

L
ORIMER GAZES AROUND
the big crowded cabin, trying to listen to the voices, trying also to ignore the twitch in his insides that means he is about to remember something bad. No help; he lives it again, that long-ago moment. Himself running blindly—or was he pushed?—into the strange toilet at Evanston Junior High. His fly open, his dick in his hand, he can still see the gray zipper edge of his jeans around his pale exposed pecker. The hush. The sickening wrongness of shapes, faces turning. The first blaring giggle.
Girls.
He was in the
girls’ can
.

He flinches wryly now, so many years later, not looking at the women’s faces. The cabin curves around over his head, surrounding him with their alien things: the beading rack, the twins’ loom, Andy’s leatherwork, the damned kudzu vine wriggling everywhere, the chickens. So cozy . . . Trapped, he is. Irretrievably trapped for life in everything he does not enjoy. Structurelessness. Personal trivia, unmeaning intimacies. The claims he can somehow never meet. Ginny:
You never talk to me. . . .
Ginny, love, he thinks involuntarily. The hurt doesn’t come.

Bud Geirr’s loud chuckle breaks in on him. Bud is joking with some of them, out of sight around a bulkhead. Dave is visible, though. Major Norman Davis on the far side of the cabin, his bearded profile bent toward a small dark woman Lorimer can’t quite focus on. But Dave’s head seems oddly tiny and sharp, in fact the whole cabin looks unreal. A cackle bursts out from the “ceiling”—the bantam hen in her basket.

At this moment Lorimer becomes sure he has been drugged.

Curiously, the idea does not anger him. He leans or rather tips back, perching cross-legged in the zero gee, letting his gaze go to the face of the woman he has been talking with. Connie. Constantia Morelos. A tall moonfaced woman in capacious green pajamas. He has never really cared for talking to women. Ironic.

“I suppose,” he says aloud, “it’s possible that in some sense we are not here.”

That doesn’t sound too clear, but she nods interestedly. She’s watching my reactions, Lorimer tells himself. Women are natural poisoners. Has he said that aloud too? Her expression doesn’t change. His vision is taking on a pleasing local clarity. Connie’s skin strikes him as quite fine, healthy-looking. Olive tan even after two years in space. She was a farmer, he recalls. Big pores, but without the caked look he associates with women her age.

“You probably never wore makeup,” he says. She looks puzzled. “Face paint, powder. None of you have.”

“Oh!” Her smile shows a chipped front tooth. “Oh, yes, I think Andy has.”

“Andy?”

“For plays. Historical plays, Andy’s good at that.”

“Of course. Historical plays.”

Lorimer’s brain seems to be expanding, letting in light. He is understanding actively now, the myriad bits and pieces linking into patterns. Deadly patterns, he perceives; but the drug is shielding him in some way. Like an amphetamine high without the pressure. Maybe it’s something they use socially? No, they’re watching, too.

“Space bunnies, I still don’t dig it,” Bud Geirr laughs infectiously. He has a friendly buoyant voice people like; Lorimer still likes it after two years.

“You chicks have kids back home, what do your folks think about you flying around out here with old Andy, h’mm?” Bud floats into view, his arm draped around a twin’s shoulders. The one called Judy Paris, Lorimer decides; the twins are hard to tell. She drifts passively at an angle to Bud’s big body: a jutbreasted plain girl in flowing yellow pajamas, her black hair raying out. Andy’s red head swims up to them. He is holding a big green spaceball, looking about sixteen.

“Old Andy.” Bud shakes his head, his grin flashing under his thick dark mustache. “When I was your age, folks didn’t let their women fly around with me.”

Connie’s lips quirk faintly. In Lorimer’s head the pieces slide toward pattern. I know, he thinks. Do you know I know? His head is vast and crystalline, very nice really. Easier to think. Women . . . No compact generalization forms in his mind, only a few speaking faces on a matrix of pervasive irrelevance. Human, of course. Biological necessity. Only so, so . . . diffuse? Pointless? . . . His sister Amy,
soprano con tremulo: Of course women could contribute as much as men if you’d treat us as equals. You’ll see!
And then marrying that idiot the second time. Well, now he can see.

“Kudzu vines,” he says aloud. Connie smiles. How they all smile.

“How ’boot that?” Bud says happily. “Ever think we’d see chicks in zero gee, hey, Dave? Artits-stico. Woo-ee!” Across the cabin Dave’s bearded head turns to him, not smiling.

“And ol’ Andy’s had it all to his self. Stunt your growth, lad.” He punches Andy genially on the arm, Andy catches himself on the bulkhead. Bud can’t be drunk, Lorimer thinks; not on that fruit cider. But he doesn’t usually sound so much like a stage Texan either. A drug.

“Hey, no offense,” Bud is saying earnestly to the boy, “I mean that. You have to forgive one underprilly, underprivileged brother. These chicks are good people. Know what?” he tells the girl. “You could look stu-pendous if you fix yourself up a speck. Hey, I can show you, old Buddy’s a expert. I hope you don’t-mind my saying that. As a matter of fact, you look real stupendous to me right now.”

He hugs her shoulders, flings out his arm and hugs Andy too. They float upward in his grasp, Judy grinning excitedly, almost pretty.

“Let’s get some more of that good stuff.” Bud propels them both toward the serving rack, which is decorated for the occasion with sprays of greens and small real daisies.

“Happy New Year! Hey, Happy New Year, y’all!”

Faces turn, more smiles. Genuine smiles, Lorimer thinks, maybe they really like their new years. He feels he has infinite time to examine every event, the implications evolving in crystal facets. I’m an echo chamber. Enjoyable, to be the observer. But others are observing too. They’ve started something here. Do they realize? So vulnerable, three of us, five of them, in this fragile ship. They don’t know. A dread unconnected to action lurks behind his mind.

“By god, we made it,” Bud laughs. “You space chickies, I have to give it to you. I commend you, by god, I say it. We wouldn’t be here, wherever we are. Know what, I jus’ might decide to stay in the service after all. Think they have room for old Bud in your space program, sweetie?”

“Knock that off, Bud,” Dave says quietly from the far wall. “I don’t want to hear us use the name of the Creator like that.” The full chestnut beard gives him a patriarchal gravity. Dave is forty-six, a decade older than Bud and Lorimer. Veteran of six successful missions.

“Oh, my apologies, Major Dave old buddy.” Bud chuckles intimately to the girl. “Our commanding ossifer. Stupendous guy. Hey, Doc!” he calls. “How’s your attitude? You making out dinko?”

“Cheers,” Lorimer hears his voice reply, the complex stratum of his feelings about Bud rising like a kraken in the moonlight of his mind. The submerged silent thing he has about them all, all the Buds and Daves and big, indomitable, cheerful, able, disciplined, slow-minded mesomorphs he has cast his life with. Meso-ectos, he corrected himself; astronauts aren’t muscleheads. They like him, he has been careful about that. Liked him well enough to get him on
Sunbird
, to make him the official scientist on the first circumsolar mission. That little Doc Lorimer, he’s cool, he’s on the team. No shit from Lorimer, not like those other scientific assholes. He does the bit well with his small neat build and his deadpan remarks. And the years of turning out for the bowling, the volleyball, the tennis, the skeet, the skiing that broke his ankle, the touch football that broke his collarbone. Watch that Doc, he’s a sneaky one. And the big men banging him on the back, accepting him. Their token scientist . . . The trouble is, he isn’t any kind of scientist anymore. Living off his postdoctoral plasma work, a lucky hit. He hasn’t really been into the math for years, he isn’t up to it now. Too many other interests, too much time spent explaining elementary stuff. I’m a half-jock, he thinks. A foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier, and I’d be just like them. One of them. An alpha. They probably sense it underneath, the beta bile. Had the jokes worn a shade thin in
Sunbird
, all that year going out? A year of Bud and Dave playing gin. That damn exercycle, gearing it up too tough for me. They didn’t mean it, though. We were a team.

The memory of gaping jeans flicks at him, the painful end part—the grinning faces waiting for him when he stumbled out. The howls, the dribble down his leg. Being cool, pretending to laugh too. You shitheads, I’ll show you.
I am not a girl.

Bud’s voice rings out, chanting, “And a hap-pee New Year to you-all down there!” Parody of the oily NASA tone. “Hey, why don’t we shoot ‘em a signal? Greetings to all you Earthlings, I mean, all you little Lunies. Happy New Year in the good year whatsis.” He snuffles comically. “There is a Santy Claus, Houston, ye-ew nevah saw nothin’ like this! Houston, wherever you are,” he sings out. “Hey, Houston! Do you read?”

In the silence Lorimer sees Dave’s face set into Major Norman Davis, commanding.

And without warning he is suddenly back there, back a year ago in the cramped, shook-up command module of
Sunbird
, coming out from behind the sun. It’s the drug doing this, he thinks, as memory closes around him, it’s so real. Stop. He tries to hang on to reality, to the sense of trouble building underneath.

– But he can’t, he is
there
, hovering behind Dave and Bud in the triple couches, as usual avoiding his official station in the middle, seeing beside them their reflections against blackness in the useless port window. The outer layer has been annealed, he can just make out a bright smear that has to be Spica floating through the image of Dave’s head, making the bandage look like a kid’s crown.