Mysteries of Motion (80 page)

Nevertheless, it is my opinion that with one sad exception we continue to be what is called sane. During this first period, perhaps what one might call hyper-sane. Stress takes its toll, and we are human still. I trust you will be glad to hear that. Though reassurance would be welcome.

To return to Mole. I knelt to him. In that other corridor, the germ-proofing one, through which we had been passed like show animals being defleaed in the anteroom of a good veterinary, he had approached me to inquire my identity, or award me it. I could only do the same for him. “You Mole?”

The eyes answered as I had known they would. I was just getting to my feet awkwardly when Soraya screamed.

Left of the body where the wall curved into the floor, we saw two—how shall I describe them to you? Not gnats, for they did not fly. Perhaps midges, if any of the Chironomidae move that infinitesimally. We could not see their motion by any stare. But Mulenberg interrupting to check what we saw, when we bent again, they had shifted position in tandem. Toward the body.

None of us moved. I suppose we might have. I doubt I need to explain, though. The motives from which one does or does not kill a midge.

“We must bury him,” Wert said.

We shifted our stare. One does not bury in that sea.

But Wert never suggests what can’t be done. In the face of constant rebuff he keeps the practicality of his lost statesmanship, plus a store of handy items observed. He led us to the Sick Bay.

Lievering was too spent to help us there. Mulenberg pushed the hardest, cursing loudly. He thinks the sealing can only have been intentional. I would prefer to blame the vehicle. Wert won’t say. But we got into the Bay, carrying Mole in cortege.

The medic is our live casualty. You may think it pitiable that a man who hates priests, if not the fecundity of Catholic wives, should expend his madness in crossing himself. We think it the way he stays in touch with his family. Otherwise he keeps to his corner, considering us his jailers. He saw too many prisons perhaps. But as you and we know, it’s no use becoming a space-buff because of that.

He still has his uses. Sometimes we can get a sharp medical hint from him, especially if we petition as a group. And if we have a task which falls outside the assigned, he likes to have us throw his dice for it. But as yet, while we lifted the hasp of the box-bed Wert indicated, the two women holding up the lid, and lowered Mole into it, what the medic was doing seemed as yet only appropriate. He never makes a sound at it.

Then they all looked to me. For the rites of emphasis, I suppose, and continuity. A role ridiculed behind one’s back, though my cabinmates are kinder than you below ever were. All groups must have someone like me. And I am used to it.

I did not kneel again, though perhaps I could have. Nor did I look into the box. While I hunted for words, Wert, waving Soraya off, took her corner of the lid. No one dared relieve Veronica. Though the lid, as you no doubt know, is on a spring which takes strength to resist. I knew without question that he and she would uphold the lid until words were found. We had already begun to be a group, but were only halfway along, and if we had docked, would have been dispersible. Your command sealed us; that is what gods do. The rites evolve.

I spoke first for all of us. Perhaps pompously, though I saw no one wince. I can’t say as to any of you, if you had been monitoring. Including Perdue. Though I spoke for him, too. “It’s possible to remember in one’s own cells the morality of the young—” I said, “and to do nothing.”

Then I spoke for Mole. Telling why I did not need to see his face again. I could hear his voice: People when they sleep, they look so Unknown. “You are not Unknown,” I said.

These boxes you have provided us with make fine platforms. Better even than the ones marked
X.
Anyone may make use of them.

U.S.
Courier,
on what we have decreed to be the fourteenth of July.

Bastille Day? Seems the day for it. To set forth for you what are the major divisions of lives anywhere, but are more starkly evident for groups like ours. I won’t say—primitive ones. Though we exhibit certain—reversions, your anthropologists might call them, or retreats. We think of these, or begin to, as advances.

After Mole, we were hungry, and since our respects had been paid, not ashamed of it. One eats to live, and to be able to remember among whom. The Galley’s consumables, weighed in for the voyage, were almost gone. Did we still think we were only in delay? People in any kind of craft which keeps them one or more steps away from the elements—even a sinking boat in sight of those drowning or blown away from it—are until the last optimistic. We are so yet.

“I felt—”

Each of us said it, still trying to phrase that moment of non-impact. Suddenly the table was pounded. The debris there jumped like a second meal offered.

Lievering has never made loud gestures, or anti-social ones, or those of personal enmity. Yet he can never be private enough for our comfort; his is a channel which can neither close nor be stanched. Now he seemed to us at last outside himself. In his effort to get closer to us? Or away from you?

“When the Mom
ent
came—” he said, Germanizing it, “ah you knew it at once. That stone in the heel, the brace in the back. That wooing in the hands—ah you knew.” This was the gentle chiding of the pulpit, drawing out the better or worse side of a constituent but always the unconscious one. I was never that good at it. Pure reason can never take its place. As soon as he spoke even I recognized the identity of that once-simple reaction: the tendency of every particle of matter toward every other.

“Gravity.
Gravity.
We felt gravity.” Not all of us shouted. But it was a chorus. “Yes, perhaps that’s what it was. The Mom
ent.”

Afterward, we each confessed to doubts. His is the shaman-face in which our century professes not to believe. But we were agreeing with the essence of this man—which we seem now to do in turn for each of us—and it is true that gravitation, the full-force variant, no longer haunts our dreams. Even I, who craved it most, am ascetic now. What I remember instead is—that moment. Which in our folklore—yes, call it that—is now the birth one, the big or little bang which initiated our present small voyage—and universe. With your same gods holding our fate in the balance—your Joint Command. As they hold yours.

Do I mock? Yes. When I can.

When it came to us we were not in dockage?

When it came to us that we were in orbit?

When it came to us that the flight deck was no longer with us

When it came to us that we might be alone in our universe

We were passing through these shocks in that timeless state in which peoples form religions to help explain where they are, and in what condition. We were to go over those statements again and again, as I have printed them. They had become our psalter.

As you will know from similar sessions on us, we were preparing our excuses. After which we set about paying our tithe.

How much time elapsed before we gave thought to whether others were alive behind those sealed hatches, I hesitate to say. Once we got to it, we debated agreeably long. If they were alive, were they in willful non-communication? If so, then were we the ones being left to wither as we might, on what they assumed were our scant remaining rations. “To twist in the wind?” Wert said. He still smiles.

That old government phrase for the expendable was the first tonic one. Crisping us in mind. For as I strive to show here, though except for the medic we are not in any sense mad, we go in and out of psychic states ranging from the depressed to the exalted—just as you. And in somewhat tighter quarters. With information at best restricted and now entirely withheld. We do have one advantage over you. I’ll come to it.

Finally it was decided we must make every effort—but only as we could—toward the flight deck. It was not so brave of us. By now, no one seemed to be holding us back.

We went as a body, the women, too. We had never traversed the whole length of the
Courier
in a body. It is the kind of travel people do in their own houses, huts or condominiums, circling beyond habit, approval or repulsion, testing their place. When we passed Cabins Three and Four we checked our speech, took stock of each others’ faces and stole by as past an ambush. Though we keep them in conscience, we have since come to believe this the best way of dealing with Cabins Three and Four.

Yet when we came to the flight deck, behind which were men of the same order, we halted in awe. Stupid men though these officers inside might be in other contexts, here we had been hostages to their expertise. Also we felt some pleasure, for we had been trained to defer to them as invulnerable. Finally, though, we felt generous. They had the computers. For this we would free them, if they needed it.

So we stood before the hatch. Who was it prewarned us to don our oxygen masks? As so often happens between close inmates, most likely a common impulse arose in all of us.

First off we pressed the signal-plate, then the hidden spare. Then, the four men abreast, the women leaning their weight behind, we pushed. The door gave. Then we tried to hold the women back. Those two would have none of that. It was a necessary rite, to file in one by one—to see what could happen here—and file out again.

They had died at their posts. Steadfast. In their Auxiliary Environment. Which we civilians had not been allowed. Though an inhalation of hyperbaric oxygen over 5 ATA (atmospheres absolute), and possibly beyond, does indeed induce convulsion, the harness they died in gave them no leeway. As each scarab-dyed face with its
risus sardonicus
testified. Identification could not be routine, but we managed some. Flight Commander Charles Dove (or Mission Captain or Head Pilot, since we are not sure of these distinctions, but most certainly alumnus of a college whose class ring, found in his breast pocket, is an amethyst in sterling) died in the extra or jumpseat. The head seat, or head astronaut’s, was occupied by a male, probably white, in Army uniform, rank major general, identity unknown.

Though the atmosphere had returned to normal, our masks were needed. For your aeromedicals: either death from central-nervous toxicity has a special morbidity or in spite of the dryness here other factors make decomposition quick. Or else we were deceived, as we so often are now, on how much duration had passed.

But flesh—one cannot simply close the door on it. Or not immediately. In our next log I hope to record what has been done. Though promises congeal here. Action proposed retrogrades into performance already accomplished. Motion is catatonic, and sometimes occurs only in the head. On occasion we have even used mirrors—the walls serve as they can—to confirm our acts. But of this I am sure. Jettison—of those bodies—will be contemplated.

LOG FOUR:
Timeless

From the need to clear the flight deck of those bodies have come all our assigned tasks. Indeed, is it not the same with you and your work? What is one of your decades at bottom, other than a process by which bodies are got rid of, to provide space for those to come? And that is its motion.

Lievering refused volunteers. So, though Jack each time helps him remove and transfer a body to the designated point outside the vehicle, he stops there; it is Wolf who jettisons. The satisfaction he gets from this is clearly a form of justice the rest of us couldn’t attain to but can respect. (We grow ever more tolerant here. In certain reprises of clarity, the kind you might have at the end of a hard day’s work, or gazing suddenly at a friend immersed in his, this worries me.)

Our other great task has been to classify the supplies in the bay and arrange a system of provendering the Galley. Solids are in impressive supply, and as the Galley nozzles run dry—the soft drink one, lately more popular, already has—we shall broach the cases of distilled water which were for manufacturing use but appear drinkable. What we have not fathomed is how to restock the Galley mechanically, so we must in a sense shop in the Bay and carry home each day. Day? Without ways to sector our duration would we not grow abstracted, even anarchic? The weather at the portholes is no help diurnally. To our relief, our circadian rhythms have taken over, not only privately, as with the bowels, but collectively. Certain rhythms were to come naturally, from living close.

For sleep, we return to the cabin, and it is remarkable how we begin to converge upon it from whatever point in our small terrain, at an hour we tend to think coincides with your dusk, Wolf and Jack in from the hunt as it were, stopping by at the Hygiene Unit for the necessary ablutions afterward, followed by each of us, in from one of the domestic chores we have so handily divided. A toy satisfaction can come of that alone. The danger, as you know, is its comfort, in which one can sink larger concerns. So we have our discipline, which is each “night” to don our support-suits, for excusable display to you—and in the hope that the call will come.

When, however, you do not, all our problems recoil on us. Well supplied as the Bay is, we cannot replenish. Though the
WASTAT
bins and Dry Johns appear stable, chemicals have their limits. Our situation cannot go on as is forever. Of course, neither can yours, and you too are veterans of unanswered prayer. Under this analogy, a kind of blessing, we are able to fall asleep. It is almost a religious experience. So, by the careful manipulation of this and other analogies, we survive, to arrive at the next stage of what it may please you to dub our culture. If you do monitor us, you may be expecting it, cast in your image as we are. For there has always to be an enemy, doesn’t there? Your Joint Command, who indeed presented themselves, were too remote. Carefully we repressed any thought of engaging you down there in toto, even psychologically. As I warned, an island may never entirely reject the mainland. Interdependent, and permanently land-locked as we were, only an ideological quarrel was open to us. So ours was, yet like any of yours still based on supply and demand.

One day Wolf came to us. You must understand that the disposal of each of the dead was a project in itself, involving what may have been weeks of logistical planning, even at the outset some mechanical drawing, followed by the construction of slings, preparation of cerements for each poor scarab—whose weight loss did help—all the way to the final execution, to which the rest of us, trouping forward, contributed a few simple choirings.
Basta, you know the process!
But now our supply had run out. Wolf had long since sent the tenth body into space. Moreover, not wishing to disturb us with questions of sentiment, and knowing how badly we kept track, he had proceeded on. The whistlers were also already in space.