Moon Flower (11 page)

“It’s usually called the nuts game, but it’ll work just as well with these.” Shearer came back to the table with a box lid containing the plastic counters, disks, tiles, and tokens that he had collected from the games scattered about the C Deck messroom, which also served as a recreation center. “Forget what they look like. Everything counts the same.”

The four people seated at the long table by the wall waited curiously. A metal bowl emptied of its normal content of fruits and snack items stood in the middle between them. Jerri was one. Roy, the Mouth, of course, had to be there. The other two were Arnold, the real-estate planner, and Zoe, an administrator who would be joining the logistics staff at the Cyrene base. Jeff was watching with interest from a nearby chair, while other figures who happened to be around at the time looked on. The ship was two days past the H-point, now under Heim drive and simulating normal gravity inside. It was also cut off from the familiar universe as far as anything electromagnetic was concerned. The external imagers showed uniform blackness on the screens. The only information reaching the vessel was communications and navigation data received by special instruments.

Shearer went on, continuing as he spoke, “I put some of these objects in the bowl like so.... Jeff has the watch. When he says ‘Go,’ your aim is to end up with as many as you can. Then, every ten seconds, I want Jeff to tell you to stop so I can count whatever’s left in there. I’ll double the number by replenishing from this box. Everybody okay?”

“Just end up with as many as we can,” Zoe said.

“Right,” Shearer confirmed. “Play whatever strategy you think will best achieve that.”

Roy was flexing his arms and shoulders as if loosening up for a football game. Arnold remained impassive. Jerri’s eyes flickered over them in a curious kind of way as if trying to read something or get their attention, but they failed to notice.

Shearer nodded to Jeff. Jeff consulted his watch, waited few seconds, then ordered, “
Go
.”

Roy lifted up the bowl, clearly with the intention of simply emptying the entire content in front of him. It was a good try, but Zoe reacted quickly enough to intercept the bowl in midcourse and dig a hand inside, in the process of which they turned it over to scatter disks and tokens all over the table. As shouts of encouragement and jeers erupted around the room, Arnold dove in smoothly to sweep a heap together with both arms as they fell, leaving Roy and Zoe to scrabble frantically for the remainder. Jerri sat watching them, motionless, making no attempt to join in. The expression on her face was a mixture of exasperation and despair.

“
Stop
,” Jeff announced.

The outcome was foreseeable from the beginning. Shearer made a show of righting the upturned bowl and inspecting it. “Game over,” he said.

“Some game,” a mystified voice said in the background. “That’s it?”

“Arnold wins,” another declared. “Look at all that! Nice move, Arnold.”

“Only because I stopped Roy for him,” Zoe said, sitting back to release her assortment of disks and tokens.

“It takes a planner.” Arnold grinned as he returned his own pile of spoils to Shearer to separate out.

“Damn, and I had it figured out,” Roy muttered peevishly. He braced his arms along the edge of the table and rose. “You just got in lucky,” he told Zoe, then rose and turned away. Amazingly he was irked at losing in even something as trivial as this; but Shearer had seen it before.

“So that’s it, Marc?” the person who had spoken before called again. “What’s it supposed to prove?”

“Tell you tomorrow,” Shearer answered. “Let’s just say, something to think about.”

“What was the matter with you, Jerri?” someone else asked.

Arnold got up and moved around from the bench seat by the wall, looking distinctly underwhelmed. “I’ll wait to hear about it then,” he said to Shearer. “Right now, I think I might go and check what they’ve got in the canteen. I haven’t had anything since lunch. Want to come along?”

“Thanks, I ate earlier. It was meat loaf, chicken, or fried fish.”

“Hey, can I come along?” Zoe asked Arnold. “I could use something too.”

“Sure.”

She got up to join him. “See you people later.” They left.

Jerri stayed to help Shearer sort out the items according to the various games they had been borrowed from. Jeff began picking out the boxes and passing them over, while all around, the chatter picked up again as people returned to what they had been doing.

“No, the pyramids and cubes go with those,” Shearer said, motioning with a hand.

“Oh, okay,” Jerri acknowledged.

“Why did you just sit there?” Jeff asked her, puzzled. He shook his head at Shearer. “She didn’t even try.”

“I won’t be forced into being stupid,” Jerri said. Jeff seemed baffled and looked at Shearer again.

Shearer had never seen anyone respond that way before. He stared at her for several seconds, not quite sure what to make of it. She met his eye unwaveringly, a faint, impish smile on her face and an expression that seemed to say,
You know what I’m talking about. I don’t have to spell it out
. “Most people don’t see it,” he said finally. “And the few who do usually get pressured into going along anyway.”

“Just like life,” she said.

“That’s the whole point.”

“And what makes it stupid. As I just said, I won’t do it.”

It was one of the rare occasions in life where Shearer felt he was communicating with someone, instead of returning expected litanies and leaving half of his person switched off. Jerri regarded him with a measured wariness, as if searching for clues that he was genuine; but the half-smile remained playing on her mouth. There was something precious and pleasingly intimate in the feeling that they were the only two in the room who understood the meaning of what had happened a few minutes ago. Jeff cemented it by doing a double take from one to the other. “Hey, is there something going on here that I’m not seeing?... Oh, okay, I get it.”

Shearer was starting to find Jeff’s eternal presence a little wearisome. At every turn it seemed that Jeff was there, like a shadow. He was personable enough in his way, but at times he could be inquisitive about Shearer’s personal business to a degree that went beyond the familiarity of a new friendship. He wanted to know about Shearer’s background, his politics; the kind of work he did, who this person Wade was that he was going to join; did he know where Wade was on Cyrene? It wasn’t as if Jeff had ever met Wade, even, or if Wade’s work held any particular significance. But Jeff sometimes talked as if he were inquiring after a lost personal acquaintance.

Jerri seemed to sense it, and Shearer found that it didn’t surprise him. “It’s about time I went to check on Nim,” she said. “Want to come and say hello?” Nim was short for Nimrod. Nim and Shearer knew each other by now, from the hotel in San Jose and a couple of times since the beginning of the voyage, when Jerri had brought him out for a walk around the decks. Shearer made a point of keeping a few of Nim’s favorite treats in his pocket.

“Good idea,” Shearer agreed. He finished putting the last of the games back together, and closed the box. Jerri was already on her feet, waiting. Jeff sent him a broad wink as they turned to go. Shearer was glad that Jerri didn’t notice. Or if she did, she pretended not to.

The core section of the
Tacoma
’s generally circular form extended out to about a quarter of the radius and was divided into upper and lower parts. The upper part contained the command and control centers, and officer’s quarters. The lower part was designated the E Section and formed an enclave reserved for a more exclusive set of passengers. The remainder, consisting of ordinary professionals, artisans, intended settlers, and military-security personnel, were housed in the midships decks between the core and the power, propulsion, and machinery compartments located around the periphery. Accommodation in E-Section was in the form of individual cabins fitted with full-size beds as opposed to bunks, bathrooms with whirlpool tubs, minibar, office-fitted desk, and an appropriate complement of comforts not found in the regular quarters. It contained its own dining room, pool, exercise center, and entertainment theater, and access from other parts of the ship was through security points that were manned at all times. The two worlds into which society back home had polarized were represented faithfully.

Within E Section, the rigid social hierarchy of Earth’s wealth-based elite was reflected in the ordering of the accommodation levels from upper, near the ship’s center line immediately below the command and control decks, to lower, at the bottom of the core. The upper ones boasted progressively more square footage, richer decor, and bigger beds, turning into two-room suites at the top. The cabin assigned to Myles Callen was below those occupied by the independently rich and influential, CEOs, and company presidents, but above upper managers, senior government officials, and top professionals.

He sat in a bathrobe and slippers at the desk and electronic office unit fitted into one corner of the room, watching a transmission from Emner, the Director of the Terran base near the city of Revo, on Cyrene. It had come in some hours previously, in response to Callen’s latest questions, sent earlier. Emner’s words were as perplexing as ever, and the message not reassuring.

“You don’t understand. I’ve tried to tell you people, but you still don’t understand. Cyrene does things to your mind. The things you think are normal from living on Earth don’t apply here. How can I explain it?...” Emner’s hand flashed briefly as a blur in the foreground on the screen. He looked haggard beneath his head of straight, gray hair, as if he had been carrying a burden of worry for weeks. “It’s as if you’ve lived your whole life in a fog, and emerged into daylight for the first time. You see things clearly that you never even knew existed before — yet they were there all along. You look back, and you can see the shapes of people still blundering around in the fog. But you can’t communicate with them. There is no common language. They don’t have the words.”

Callen smacked the edge of the desk with his hand in frustration. He wanted to shout,
What things
? The messages always rambled round and around the point. They were never specific.

Emner leaned back. There was a distant, half-focused look about his eyes. Callen couldn’t decide if it signified a fanatic losing touch with reality, or the effects of something local in the environment, as Krieg had said. Emner looked away for a moment, as if consulting something.

“Why do we stay?” That had been another of Callen’s questions. If whatever the influence was had caused a majority from two missions to disappear from the base at Revo, what was different about Emner and the others who still remained? “To stop you and what you represent. This world has to be protected. You’ll destroy it, just as you have begun the destruction of every other world you’ve touched. You can’t see it and you don’t understand, because you’re still inside the fog. Maybe Cyrene will make you understand. But if not, somebody has to.”

Callen paused the recording there, and sat frowning for several minutes. Then he got up and paced slowly over to the bar, where he poured a shot from the decanter of whiskey. He added one cube of ice from the dispenser, swirled it around with a stirrer while he stood thinking, then tasted it and moved back to the desk. “Cabin manager,” he said aloud.

“Answering,” a synthetic voice replied from the speakers.

“Connect me to Krieg, audio only.”

Krieg came on the line ten seconds or so later.

“Can you get along here when you have a moment?” Callen said. “There could be a problem of running into some resistance at Cyrene. We might be talking about having to mount a forced takeover there, possibly armed. I’d like to hear your thoughts.”

“I’m on my way,” Krieg replied neutrally.

Callen cut off the screen. If he ended up effectively having to run the base, it would cut too much into the other duties that he was supposed to be taking care of. The other thing he should do, he reflected, would be to have a relief commander and staff sent out from Earth on a fast military clipper as quickly as could be organized. He would get a preliminary message off to Borland as soon as he had finished talking with Krieg.

“So how did you get out of Texas?” Jerri asked. “Wasn’t there a lot of trouble around then, with everybody trying to get into Occidena because that was where the money and the military were, and the top-paying work?” She was sitting on a plastic-wrapped pack marked “Coveralls, Medium — Qty. 4,” set atop a solvent cannister to make a seat in the storage bay on the lower deck of the Outer Ring, just inboard from the power and engines. Nim’s box had been left open to the aisles between the stacks of crates and shelved bays lining the walls to let him move around. The crew joked that it made them feel the place was properly guarded. Nim lay gnawing at a bone between his paws that Shearer had acquired from one of the cooks.

“That’s right, there was,” Shearer agreed, ruffling Nim’s ears. “But with the new space industries mushrooming overnight, you just walked right in if you had the kind of talent they needed. Physics was high on the list. And I was lucky, too, in knowing someone who’d pointed me to the right names there.”

“The professor who never showed up on the boat out of Tampa?”

“Uh-huh.” Shearer nodded heavily.

Jerri produced a beef-flavored munchy and showed it to Nim. The dog watched her alertly, ears pricked. She flipped it with a thumb; Nim caught it and devoured it in a couple of gulps. “But you weren’t with any of the space corporations there,” she said. “You told us you work in this little lab at the back of Berkeley somewhere.”

Shearer sighed. “I guess I’ll never be a millionaire, will I? I don’t know.... It just seems to me that there’s more to life than buying and selling. Everything you do from one end of the week to the other shouldn’t have to be justified by a profit-and-loss account.” He cocked an inquiring eye at her. “So does that make me a hopelessly incorrect write-off? You know, all the dreaded words: noncompetitive; underachiever....” He shook his head. “But no. From the little I’ve seen of you, I’d say it wouldn’t matter.”