Ship of Fools (18 page)

“
Habla español?
” I tried next. I didn’t speak Spanish very well, but it wouldn’t take much if the old woman did. Still no response.

“We’ve got to get her out of here before the others arrive,” Cardenas reminded me. “So they can use the air lock to come through.” She went to the door and opened it.

Hollings picked up the old woman’s legs, bending the knees, and we carried her into the circular room. Cardenas came through behind us, then spun the wheel and sealed the door shut.

“
Français?
” Cardenas tried. “
Nihongo?”

Nothing. The old woman hung in my arms like a newly dead corpse, tangled filthy hair covering her face. I thought she’d passed out, or fallen asleep. But then she began to softly weep. The sound was so quiet, almost a whimper, I doubted Cardenas and Hollings could hear her. My heart aching for her, I held the woman tightly to me, and we waited in silence for Taggart and the others to arrive.

W
E
sedated the old woman before putting her into a pressure suit. Her soft crying, although it had ceased long before, still resonated in me. I held her while Cardenas pulled away the layers of fabric, exposing her shoulder. Taggart put the gun against it and pulled the trigger. It took a couple of minutes to take effect, but eventually she slumped in my arms and I laid her gently on the floor.

At rest, she looked even older than I’d thought, and I wondered if she’d ever undergone re-gen treatments. She was quite tall but extremely thin, what we could see of her. Her skin was deeply lined, and there were several dark brown spots on the backs of her wrinkled hands. Her mouth hung slightly open, revealing portions of stained teeth.

Taggart pulled away the layers of clothing and made a cursory examination of the old woman; he was clumsy in his suit, but remarkably gentle. The one peculiar thing he found was a tattoo. The initials S.C. were tattooed in dark blue on the inside of her left bicep. He nodded when he was done, and wrapped the cloaks around her once more.

“She appears to be okay. I don’t know how healthy, and she’s clearly undernourished, if not malnourished. But her pulse is surprisingly strong, and the heart sounds are good.
Lungs seem to be clear, although her breathing is a little shallow.” He paused for a moment. “She needs medical attention, but I don’t believe she’s in immediate danger.”

“We can move her, then.”

“Right.”

“Then let’s do it,” Pär said.

We did. We bundled her into the extra pressure suit, and carried her back to the shuttle.

T
HERE
seemed to be too many decisions to make, too many things to be done, and none of them could wait. We put the old woman through decontamination, but weren’t sure what to do after that—leave her in the pressure suit, or take her out and risk exposing us to whatever she might be carrying? We also had to recognize that there was a risk to
her
from
us
.

In the end, we left her in the decontamination chamber. Taggart put on a body suit, gloves, and mask, then went back into the chamber with a mat and blankets and a body suit for the woman. He eased her out of the pressure suit, cleaned her up (she’d soiled herself by then), put the body suit on her, secured her to the mat, then hooked up pressurized IV drips, including one to keep her sedated. Then he bagged up her clothes and blew them out the garbage lock, shoved his own body suit, gloves, and mask into the burn box, and returned to the main cabin.

“The sooner we get her back to the
Argonos
, the better,” he said.

“We’ll get a linkup right now and have them come and pick her up.”

“It would be better,” Taggart said, “to bring her back ourselves. Easier on her if we don’t have to move her until we’re back on the
Argonos
. We can have a team ready to take her to the med center.”

“I thought you said she wasn’t in any danger.”

“I don’t
think
she is, but I can’t know that for sure. I don’t understand. Why is this a problem?”

Others had gathered around us by now, but they were going to let us hash it out.

“Because there might be other people in the ship, that’s why it’s a problem. We need to get another team inside right away.”

“Can’t it wait a couple of days?” Taggart asked.

“No,” I said. “Even one day might make a difference to someone inside there.” I paused. “I’m even more afraid that if we go back to the
Argonos,
the Executive Council will prevent us from returning. I don’t want to take that chance.”

“It doesn’t have to wait,” put in Youngman. “We send a team in right now. The team can stay on the ship until the shuttle gets back. Or two teams would be even better. One can rest while the other keeps searching. We can live in the suits that long. It’ll be uncomfortable, but we can do it.”

I looked around at the others who were listening, and saw a nodding of heads. I nodded myself.

“I like it,” I said.

Ten minutes later, after we had gathered everyone in the main cabin, I had nine volunteers to stay in the alien ship while the shuttle took the old woman back to the
Argonos
; ten, including me. That was everyone. We would all stay.

“I
don’t like it,” Nikos said over the linkup. “If something goes wrong, there’s no way to get to you.”

“Come on, Nikos. The shuttle can be back thirty-five, forty hours after it leaves. We won’t be on our own that long.”

“Long enough. It’s not worth the risk.”

“Of course it is,” I said. “There might be other people in there,” I reminded him.

“If there are, and if they’re still alive, they’ll keep for another two days. Who knows how long they’ve been on that ship? If the woman is any indication, it’s probably been years.”

The conversation was pointless. “We’re staying,” I said.

“Not on my approval. I’ll convene the Executive Council, and we’ll discuss it.”

“Don’t bother, Nikos, there’s no time. The others are already suiting up and checking suit provisions. I’ve got to join them.”

“Are you deliberately defying me, Bartolomeo?”

I sighed. “If that’s how you want to characterize it, Nikos. There’s no Executive Council Order. You want to give a Captain’s Order and force us to disobey it, that’s your choice. I’d advise against it.”

I was glad we had the video link, because I wanted him to see my face, I wanted him to understand my determination. He gazed at me, hardly even blinking. He finally shook his head.

“You’re such a bastard sometimes, Bartolomeo. You damn well better hope this isn’t the wrong decision.”

“No matter what happens, it isn’t the wrong decision.”

Nikos snorted. “You think not? Things are never that simple, Bartolomeo. You should know that better than most.” He paused, then leaned back in his chair. “Go, Bartolomeo. Go before they leave you behind.” With that, he disconnected the linkup, and the screen went gray.

I
T
was something to see: all ten of us in pressure suits drifting in a long, irregular, ragged column, moving from room to room, along corridors and through vast, mysterious chambers in a slow-motion dance of shadow and light from the lanterns as the first person to pass each one turned it on, and the last person to go by turned it off. I was on point, and occasionally I stopped and turned around to watch the others moving toward me. I felt wonder, and even pride.

We didn’t talk much on our way in—a few words now and again, and only when necessary: to direct the opening of a hatch or door, to check that another hatch was closed—tasks of that nature. But it was not a quiet from fear or tension; it came, I believe, from calm assurance and a sense of unity.

Three hours into the ship we reached the area of gravity, and the drifting dance changed, steadied to a silent march through more regular shifting of the shadows. When we entered the circular chamber, we unloaded the equipment and supplies we’d brought with us—extra air, replacement food and water—then formed three teams. After we worked together to get the second door open, one team took that corridor, and the rest of us cautiously entered the room in which we’d found the old woman. Pär, Father Veronica, and I stayed in the room and more thoroughly searched through the old woman’s belongings, while the third team went through the open doorway at the far end and explored the area beyond.

We found little in the old woman’s room. The open cubicle we’d seen the first time, and which we hadn’t been able to examine, housed a functioning toilet; above it was a basin with running water—presumably both hot and cold, since there were two different buttons, each of which produced a flow of water when pressed.

In the right corner was a covered pad which must have served as a sleeping mat, two or three torn and filthy blankets, and several pieces of clothing as worn and dirty as the blankets—a pair of trousers, something that might have been a skirt, a couple of shirts. No underclothing.

There were four metal bowls crusted with bits of dried matter. Food, probably. Scraps of colored paper, a pair of rubber sandals. An oxidized metal bracelet inside a wooden box.

Father Veronica discovered a wall panel above the sleeping mat that opened to reveal a small cubbyhole filled with a jumble of objects. She carefully removed them one at a time, handing each to me after she had inspected it, while I in turn handed each to Pär.

The first was a large, deep blue stone about the size of my thumb. The blue had depth, and embedded in it were opalescent swirls that seemed to undulate within the dark color around them. I held the stone a long time, mesmerized, before I finally broke out of my trance and handed it to Pär.

Next came a pair of earrings with pale yellow beads and
tiny silver butterflies. After that was a small, red-bound book not much larger than my hand; inside, all of the pages were blank except for a single ink drawing of an eye on the final page. Then there was a pink, egg-shaped candle that had never been used. Also, a thin flexible tube with a cap, but nothing to identify it; when I uncapped it and gently squeezed the tube, a dark blue substance oozed from it.

The last thing Father Veronica removed from the cubbyhole was a cracked and curling photograph of a middle-aged woman with her arm around the shoulders of a much younger woman. The photograph appeared to have been taken at sea; an expanse of blue-green water stretched behind them, meeting a paler blue sky fluffed with bright white clouds. I couldn’t tell if they were standing on the deck of a boat, on a pier, or on a spit of land extending into the water from shore.

“She looks like the old woman,” Pär said. All three of us were huddled around the picture, staring at it.

“Which one?” Father Veronica asked.

She was right. They
both
looked like younger versions of the old woman. It could have been a photograph of the old woman and her daughter, or the old woman and her mother. Or neither.

“We can show it to her,” Father Veronica said. “Maybe it will help.” She carefully placed the photograph into one of her suit pockets.

We returned the rest of the objects to the cubbyhole and moved on.

T
HE
results of our initial explorations were interesting, but unremarkable. The team exploring behind the stuck door discovered only an empty room shaped much like the old woman’s, and from there a passage that terminated at a blank wall. The other team had more luck, but not much more excitement. They found a functioning wall unit in the corridor beyond the old woman’s room that produced water and what appeared to be food. That corridor, in turn, led to
a cluster of empty rooms lined with benches or sleeping platforms; each room in the cluster had another door, but the team had been unable to open any of them.

When we’d been inside the ship for fifteen hours, I ordered all activities to cease. We needed rest, and a break from the disappointment of not finding any other survivors.

I
T
felt like the dead of night. We were in the circular room, and most of us, at my insistence, were trying to sleep—I looked around at suited forms propped against the walls, lying face-up on the floor; Youngman was wedged in a doorway. Sleeping in the suits was difficult until exhaustion took over.

I sat on the top step, facing the center of the lower level. My eyes were barely open, and I thought I might fall asleep in that position. Night. Arbitrary, but even the diffuse blue light seemed dimmer than usual, although I am sure it was my imagination.

Movement brought me fully awake, but it was only Casterman getting up from his knees in the air lock, where he had been praying. He stepped over Youngman’s sleeping form in the doorway and came back into the room. For a few moments he stood motionless; then he opened one of his suit pockets, dug around in it, and pulled something out. In the dim light I couldn’t see what it was, and I wasn’t much interested.

Casterman resumed walking, headed toward the center of the room. He descended the steps, took a few more paces, then stopped. He was not quite in the center of the lower level.

“Bartolomeo,” he said.

I looked at him, waiting, but he didn’t say anything more.

“Try to get some sleep,” I eventually said.

“I’ve been trying to pray. But I’m not making a connection. The link is broken.”

I didn’t like the sound of his voice, or what he was
saying. It sounded a little bit crazy. I pushed myself up to my feet.

“Eric . . .”

“You’ve never called me that,” he said. “Always Casterman.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. None of it does. I’ve made a different connection.”

He took two more steps and stopped, standing directly in the center of the room. He looked at me, and I thought I could see him smile. He knelt and felt around on the floor with his free hand. It seemed he found what he was searching for, and pressed his fingers into the floor.

Suddenly a bright silver light came on in the ceiling directly above him, bathing him in a radiant glow that cut through the dim blue fluorescence and made it all seem even that much darker around him. Now I could see what he held in his hand, could see light reflecting from the shiny metal blade of a large, long knife. He brought himself erect, staring up at the light.

I thought he would try to use the knife on me, and I was afraid; I took a step toward him, anyway. But before I could take another, Casterman popped the seal of his helmet with his left hand, pried the helmet off, and tossed it aside. He was definitely smiling, a soft and gentle smile. Then he brought the knife up, tipped his head back, and drew the knife swiftly and deeply across his throat, crying out in surprise and pain.

I rushed forward as he fell, blood already spurting from his neck, splattering his face and suit. He hit the floor hard and heavy, and I sprawled on my hands and knees beside him, slipping in the blood.

“Help me!” I shouted, although I have no idea what I thought anyone could do.

Blood was everywhere. His body convulsed. I could see the arterial pulsing, a tiny fountain shining in the light from above. I covered the fountain with my gloved fingers, knowing it was hopeless.