Mysteries of Motion (76 page)

Yes, I am in place, Lievering now mimes to the first crewman to enter the hatch. They both have intercoms, but they all mime when they can; it seems to go better with space. Now the two men still out here must be kept in the tail of his concertmeister eye. Finally both have passed him, descending. Down there the lights on booms and side walls illumine all four now in the bay. Two are moving along the sides, which accept the longitudinal and vertical loads. Two are along the keel, which accepts the lateral ones. Now the four conjoin, maybe in conference on just where the two beauties are. He would like to turn off his intercom, but dares not. In compromise, he impels himself along the vehicle to a point from which, though he can spring to duty on command, those four are out of sight.

He is alone. He can dare to look up. He never before has. The secret of his rhythm is that unlike even a pirouetting dancer, it never fixes the eye except on an inner recess. Those possessors of a body rhythm which moves from the loins are accepted readily enough by their fellows. Those in whom it moves from the brain via the restless funnel of the mouth are often scarcely acceptable to themselves. Until he came to the
Courier
he was ashamed of his gift except when he taught.

He grasps a handrail, for dizziness. Even if he could, he wouldn’t wish to float off clothed. Stealthily, from eyes lowered but observing through what
Der Vater
had called their
Seitenflügeln
—their “side-aisles”—a practice forbidden him in the attic, he can see the universe streaming past him. In a second, he is going to cede it his innerness. Unlike in the wranglings of sex, during which some men illusion the same—the movement will not be mutual. He isn’t fool enough, like some, to expect that even of a universe.

What he fears is that when he at last stares fully at this gold-black Eden in which the
Courier
rides frictionless, once again he will see only a setting—for him. Shutting his eyes tight, riding his wedged feet like a skier, Lievering lifts his arms, his chin—and stares wide.

It is an attic. But through its chinks one may address the gods. Here in this place, there will be almost no gap between the live and the dead, or between a proposal and its destiny. Fact will fulfill itself like dream, and beyond any smirch of the logic which is also gravitational. How else could he have begun to feel—against all the weight of reason—that there must be a buried Savior already on Island, ready to rise with their coming? Because they themselves, the multiple saviors floating out on all the
Couriers,
will have brought Him there, along with them?

His audience of stars, those fixed points which he can stare at now, tell him it makes no difference why.

Was it Christian or Jewish, or even anti-Jewish, to have proposed such a thing?

Answer: Out here is the sacristy, and the rabbinate.

Now the final heresy: Is it I also who am buried there?

The answer comes as it still must to morning scholars everywhere bent over their cabalas in all the ghettos—or out free: This place sees no difference in the quality of thought as to where it is bred.

And any answer is only his own, like the one given to Mole yesterday, when that imp of a scholar—for that’s what he will be, no matter what headmasters say—asked, shivering, “Wolf—are you, are we really in that all-night sleep of the soul? Am I?” And he’d answered diffidently: “Sure. Sure, all of us,” unable to add as he should have: But you surround me, all of you.

Is that a star falling? If so, not in reply. If the word
colleague
brings tears to some eyes, those gold auras tell him, that is not our lookout.

What’s happening to his life-supports? He’s so cold now that a tomb might not be a chilly place. He sees the need for jokes. Could he make one?
Come in, Wolf,
Dr. Larry said one day.
We are going to have a little practice session. We are going to act as if you exist.
He hadn’t replied. Across the years, Lievering, another refugee, now answers him.

“Ah, Doctor—” Lievering says to the state of things, “always arguing.”

Ah, ah—the deep throb of the craft’s silent progress endorses him.

Sure        Sure    Sure    Sure    Sure    Sure.

His mouth is stiffening. Speech is what you perpetrate upon the world. “Though       it         is of no importance—” he manages to eke out, “I am trying to understand myself. And. You. Attack me.”

Out of the fund of situations offered him through life and refused, his own mouth chooses, chanting. He can see the words it speaks just as these were written down for it, some capitalized, some lowercase. At first he’d been required to know the meaning of all words on his father’s lists, but sometimes failed to. Those were the words he articulated best. Once his father caught on, the definitions were let go, though sometimes the voice at his side couldn’t forbear murmuring them, in that threatening library undertone which yet had brought the family so far. Of all the lists, loathed for being forced on him but still compelling, this one, a parable of all journeys out, had been his favorite.

Whip-tom-kelly

Beebread

hemule

Venery

Nichil

nighness

hellward

Flotant

He is going to push off. Calling out whip-whip the name of a bird, chosen for its aspirate. With traces of honeycomb on his lips. And having for company on the way one roebuck in its third year, he will surge out into the sea of venery—
mind the two meanings, son: sexual pleasure and the hunting of game.

But he is already past that, and navigating deep into the old spelling of nothingness, on two next words chosen surely for their directional help. At last, he is Flotant—
a term applied to anything flying in the air, or so displayed.

All those
h
’s, and
ch
’s, and
gh
’s, chosen so cunningly for a Teuton in England, and the
v
in
venery
the hardest; he has done it faultlessly, as never before. All the while on the journey he must have had always in mind.

He floats. On the L-5 they will have—just as is done at an Olympics—Flotant Sports. He will aim instead for those gold points which now cram toward him and recede. Come by elephant, Wolf, or by chariot, or crashing through sonnets or shopping for speech on
Der Vater’s
grocery lists; it is all the same to them.

In this attic the vision seizes one because it is already here. Even memory is returned to those who have escaped it. Ahead of him, the faces he passed by in life are filling the haunted picture frames he kept bare for martyrs he had never seen.

This is a real attack. His tongue, falling back, fills his mouth with its tremendous joke. He is the boy who kept crying “Wolf!”

The voice calling back to him is not his own. A voice! Of Brotherhood! He catapults toward it and is pulled up short, all the time attached to the craft by those wavering deep-sea divers’ coils which plumb his back. His tongue’s his own again. His fists, clawed in his mitts, relax. Upright, he jounces toward the hatch. In its metal wall he peers at himself, mirrored there. Behind that visor, is there a face he hasn’t seen recently, purer at the cheeks and mouth and temples than a man’s ought to be? It has suffered an attack of space, but it will be a useful man’s yet.

“Lievering—” the voice of the intercom says again, “come down into the bay.”

M
OLE WANTS NOTHING FROM GUNS.
He’s annexed this one because it has twice belonged to a boy his age. He has left its ammunition behind. He’s taking it along to the flight deck because it is a document. Dead and buried in a war, revived with the help of Geiger counters and slung over his fatigue suit’s shoulder by its slim new leather, it blends quite well with his other strappings and might be some newfangled implement against shark.
It’s a British Enfield,
the note accompanying it had said.
We wish it was one of ours, a Winchester. But my father says the war in these parts didn’t get those in time, not till 1865. I think he’s wrong. But anyway, it isn’t one.

That boy, too, believes his father is wrong.

On his way, he stops in at the Free Room. He has an itch to see whether anyone ever did use that little confession-pouch. If it’s still there.

He’s managed not to be in the Free Room since he hung it there. Now of course the room is empty. Empty rooms used to bug his girl, when she came into their flat alone. They know they can dispense with you, she said. But that was because she was leaving. The Free Room knows he is, too. The pouch is there. Someone has detached it from the grill-work and laid it neatly on a shelf. He half hopes. But it is empty, too.

“We missed you. At the suiting-up.”

In his sandals still, he could easily whirl and grab her, as in old courtships. His flesh creeps toward that. He answers as he is, bent to the shelf, back turned. “That why you followed me?”

“To leave a note for you.”

“Saying what?”

“Hadn’t decided yet. Just knew I wanted to.”

He turns. Suited up as she is except for bare head and hands, there still remain visible the nostrils that so please him, cut like the eyelets in his mother’s table-linen, also her height, matched against his, and most of all her skin—but why choose? There wouldn’t be time for it. There hasn’t been.

She agrees without a word. Much has been saved here, by their being in the same slot, much bypassed. He thinks of it.

“Where will you? Suit up?”

“Cabin Two.”

“And to dock? Where will you hole in?”

Nobody’s said. He’s been so much a part of the drills—and so adept at finding a place, at times he’s forgotten his own status. “Probably there. If Lievering’s on EVA though—I could come to your place.”

She laughs like a riff. He likes that best.

He flicked the empty pouch, addressing it: “Wish me luck, hear?”

Two Cabin is so silent, so ready. Entering from aft, he finds no one lounging. No more locker-room sprawl, or lilting chitchat. Though the second crew’s chaff is kindergarten stuff to the brain-scanning in Cabin Six, he’s liked it here. He sees that his usual seat—up in front of Arthur Shefflin, the next best whistler after the medic—is occupied. No sweat, now and then he’s found it so, the guy in it either telling him to buzz off to drill or galley, or in with Tuohy, or getting up himself to go back to the Pit. Which is what the flight deck is called here, manual or not.

Nobody’s moving. Though faced away from him, they have an odd symmetry. Not strapped in yet, but their visors are down. Soldier ants are said to give off odor when in swarm. He can’t smell anything new. But nobody’s turning round to him. Cabin Two is full up.

Aw,
come
on.
He doesn’t say it. That’s his pituitary taking over—that on-the-mark rush. The antennae tightness of his scalp is fear—a protective mechanism. Name it, Wolf says; then stand pat. He forces himself to. The man in the rear seat nearest him stands up. That should be Ervin. He was on EVA when Mole was. He mimes for Mole to approach the flight deck. Mole mimes back, an easy acknowledgment, staring into the other's visor as he goes forward. It isn’t Ervin.

Passing the next two seats he manages to lean friendly on each shoulder. Neither face is known to him. He passes up a couple. Seat Four is Arthur.
Ringers?
Mole says without lips as he bends over. Old Arthur blinks. “That was some cockfight, kid,” Arthur says, falsely loud. “Saw you on the monitor.” Mole passes his own usual seat without bending to its occupant.

He stands at the flight deck hatch. On the closed-circuit monitor they’ll have a view of him standing here. They’ve got used to him toting the gun. But reminded of what was cautioned him when he was led on the ship he resumes his old earth-slouch. The hatch is opening.

“Don’t shoot,” Mole said.

The flight deck is blinding bright. Icy stalagmites of chairs encrust upward from the removable floor panels. Display-and-control panels are drip-winking down. The line of crewmen is pinched between. They’re too busy to look up. Too steadfast. They wear the face-exposing chin-strapped helmets which make all men look-alikes. There is no empty seat, though there is a tenth one. He has time to count. Left of it in a fire-blackened frame is the giant star-screen which had awed the medic. Big enough for a man to walk into. Or from. Nearest it, a head turns. “Your father’s expecting you,” Dove said.

“Where?” he says humbly.

“Telephone Booth.”

The simplest directions weigh heavy here. Everything in spacecraft has a nickname. Dove, at the weekly home-dinners, had been full of them, Crawler Transports turning into Train Wrecks and one vast apparatus, whose function they were quiet about, into The Four Horsemen. It was one more way of joking. His father never joined in.

“Back there, kid.”

Offset from the rest of the avionics array, but surrounded by the ever-present computer panels and yellow alarms, is the communications center Mulenberg had half described—a whole inner box of trapped light. Well, they have to woo it far. Pride seeps to him, for workmanship in spite of all muddle. “Looks like a fortune-teller’s booth.” Going in he hangs back; in close quarters he doesn’t fancy a person behind him. No great ape does. Dove’s paw is at his elbow. He isn’t wearing his college signet ring; can’t here. His hand looks less plump without it. “Yeah, kid, that was a fight. Worried us. You’re valuable cargo. To one and all.”

They’re now concealed by the niche’s high-molded angle.

“You have visitors, Charlie. You still in command?”

Dove’s leftover burns go redder. “Never was, and you know it. Even a little kid, you were never fooled. Or about him.” Dove put his lips to Mole’s ear. “They came in the carts, at launch-time. Put in their own passengers. Your dear father had us traveling so light. That’ll teach him. Anti-civilians—he’s got ’em now.” Dove pressed a button, or what stood for buttons here. A timer dial lit up. “Seven minutes, then you’re on with him.”

“He asked for me?”

“Burnt up the wires, when he heard.”

“From where?”