The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas (15 page)

She thanks it as if it were human, nods when it asks if she wants the usual, and then she turns to me. I haven’t even looked over the menu yet, but I’m not really here for the food. I take whatever it is she’s having, order some coffee and some water, and wait until the server unit floats away.

“So,” she says, “Ewing Trekov. I knew him well.

A faint smile crosses her face as she thinks of him. Her memories—at least the one she’s lost in—are clearly pleasant.

A tray floats over with our beverages and with a large plate of cheeses and meats. I’ve never seen so many different kinds. The meats are clearly manufactured and are composed of so many different colors that I’m hesitant at first.

But Nola has been eating here for decades and seems no worse for it. After she eats a few pieces, I try one. The meat is peppery and filled with the garlic that I’ve been smelling. It’s remarkably good.

“You’re working for his daughter, right?” Nola asks. “The created one.”

“She wants me to recover her father,” I say, even though I’ve told Nola this when I first contacted her through the outpost networks. “She thinks he’s in the Room of Lost Souls.”

Nola nods just enough to confuse me. That tiny movement could mean she knows he’s in the Room or that she has heard of this daughter’s whim before. Or it could simply be an acknowledgement of what I have to say.

“Why does she want him?” Nola asks. “She never knew him.”

And I had neglected to ask that question. Or maybe it wasn’t neglect at all. If I knew, I wouldn’t have taken the job, and the job had—in the end—intrigued me.

“It’s not my concern,” I say. “I’m just supposed to find him.”

“You won’t find him,” Nola says. “He’s long gone.”

“How did you know him?” I ask, trying to get the conversation away from my job and back to her.

That small smile has returned. “The way most women knew him.”

“You were lovers.”

She nods. For a moment, her gaze rests somewhere to the left of me, and I know she’s not seeing me or the booth or any part of Number Four. She’s lost in the past with Ewing Trekov.

“You make it sound like he had a lot of lovers,” I say.

Her eyes focus and move toward me. When they rest on me, they hold a bit of contempt. She knows what I’m doing, and she doesn’t like it. She wants to control this conversation.

“A lot of lovers,” she says, “a lot of wives, and more children than he could keep track of.”

Maybe that’s where the disapproval comes from. Riya Trekov isn’t special in Nola’s eyes.

“He didn’t care about family?” I ask.

Nola shrugs. “The man I knew didn’t have time for relationships. Not long ones, any way. His entire life was about the wars and the entire sector. He saw lives the way we see stars—something far away and yet precious. Individual lives meant something to him only for a few weeks. Then he moved on.”

There’s pain in her voice.

“He moved on from you,” I say as I take some yellow cheese. It’s slimy against my fingers, but I don’t dare put it back.

“Of course he did. Anyone who believed he would do otherwise was a fool.”

But the bitter twist on the word “fool” makes it clear to me who “anyone” was.

“You said that you know things no one else does.” I make myself eat the slimy cheese. It’s remarkably good. Rich and sharp, a taste that goes well with the pepper and garlic of the meat.

“Of course I do,” she says. “And some of it will go with me to my own death.”

It’s my turn to nod. I understand that kind of privacy.

She sets the plate near the edge of the table. Something moving so fast that I can barely see it whisks the plate away.

“But the story I’m going to tell you,” she says, “isn’t one of those. And it’s not something you’ll find in the histories either.”

I wait.

“It’s about his plans,” she says with that secret smile. “He never planned to go to any of the ceremonies and he wasn’t going to sign any treaties.”

“He told you this?” I ask, mostly because she’s surprised me. Everything I’ve seen says he fully intended to go to the ceremonies. He sent notice as to when his ship would arrive. He had a contingent of honor guards waiting for him on another outpost nearer to the ceremony. He even had a dress uniform ordered special for the occasion.

“No, he didn’t tell me anything,” she says. “At least, not in so many words. He wasn’t that kind of man. I figured it out, years later.”

***

She figured it out when she remembered what happened that last day. How he’d been, how sad he seemed.

They met in his VIP cabin. It was large and lovely with a bed the size of her quarters. But he wasn’t interested in sex, although they had some.

He ordered food for them—an astonishing meal for a place this remote. Yet he didn’t enjoy the meal. He picked at it, letting much of it go to waste. She couldn’t—she hadn’t had a meal this good since she was stationed here.

But he waited until she was finished before he spoke.

“How do you do it?” he asked. “How do you save lives when you know they’ll just go to waste?”

She didn’t understand what he meant. “Go to waste?”

“Most of your patients here, they’ll get sent back out and they’ll die out there. Or they’ll go home and they won’t be the same. Their families will no longer know them. Their lives will be different.”

“But not wasted,” she said.

He kept picking at the food. He wouldn’t look at her. “How do you know?”

“How do you?” she asked.

He shrugged.

“Most of these soldiers I see, they’re children,” she said. “They’ll go home and remake their lives.”

He shrugged again. “What about career military?”

She set her own fork down and pushed her plate away. She realized then she had to pay attention to this conversation, that it seemed to be about one thing and was really about another.

“Are you worried about what’ll happen to you after the ceremonies?” she asked.

He shook his head, but he still didn’t look up. He was developing a bald spot near his crown, and he hadn’t paid for enhancements. The small circle of skin made him seem vulnerable in a way she’d never noticed before.

“This isn’t about me,” he said, but she didn’t believe him.

“You can stay in the military,” she said. “They need planners. Even in peacetime, they’ll need a standing army. Governments always do.”

“Seriously, Nola,” he said with some irritation. “It’s not about me.”

“What is it about then?” she asked.

He shook his head again. The movement was small, almost involuntary, as if he were speaking to himself instead of her.

“Your units? The people under your command?”

He kept shaking his head.

“Your injured?”

“The dead,” he said softly.

She was silent for a long time, hoping he would elaborate. But he didn’t. So she struggled to understand.

“We can’t help them,” she said. “Even now with the technology that we have, the knowledge that we have, we can’t help them. We just try to prevent death.”

“And how do you do that?” he asked, raising his head. “How do you know who’s worthy?”

She frowned. She was a doctor. She had been all her adult life. “I don’t choose the worthy ones. That’s not my decision.”

“I’ve seen triage,” he said. “You pick. You always pick.”

Her breath caught.

“I don’t choose by worthiness,” she said softly. “I choose by my skill level. I choose by time. Who will survive the intervention? Who will take the least amount of time so that I can get to other injured? Who will be the least amount of work.”

That last made her face flush. She’d never admitted it to someone else before—at least not to someone who wasn’t a doctor, someone who wasn’t really faced with those decisions.

“That’s how you pick who’s worthy,” he said.

His words made her flush deepen.

“Doesn’t that bother you? Don’t you look at the ones you didn’t even try to save, the ones you sacrificed for the others, and wonder about them? Don’t you sometimes think you made the wrong choice?”

Her face was so warm now that it actually hurt.

“No.” She wanted to say that with confidence, but her voice was small, smaller than she’d ever heard it around him. “If I thought I always made the wrong choice, I couldn’t do my job.”

“But in the wee hours, when you’re alone…?”

She was staring at him. He hadn’t looked up once.

After a moment, he shook his head a third time, as if he were arguing with himself.

“Never mind,” he said. “I’m just tired.”

Which gave her an excuse to leave.

She had no sense it was the last time she’d see him. The next day, he had left the outpost.

And she never heard from him again.

***

“I’m sorry,” I say after giving her a moment to return from the memory. “I don’t see how all of that meant he didn’t plan to go to the ceremony. I don’t see how this relates to the Room of the Lost Souls.”

She raises her eyebrows in surprise. I get the distinct feeling she has just decided I’m dumb.

“He wasn’t thinking about the future,” she says. “He was thinking about the past.”

“I got that,” I say, and hope the words weren’t too defensive. “But he makes no mention of the ceremonies or of the Room. So I’m not sure how you made the connection all these years later.”

A slight frown creases the bridge of her nose. “The Room,” she says, “is a pilgrimage. Some say it’s a sacred place. Others believe only the damned can visit it.”

My breath catches. I haven’t heard any of that before. Or maybe I have. I used to make it a practice of not listening to stories about the Room because I believed no one could understand that place if they hadn’t been there.

“All right,” I say, “let’s assume he knew that. How do you know he went there next?”

“His crew says so.” She crosses her arms.

“I know that,” I say. “But you found this interchange important. Enlighten me. Why?”

“Because I was stupid,” she snaps. “He wasn’t talking about me. He was talking about himself.
His
choices.
His
way of doing things.
His
losses. I’m sure he was reflecting on them because everyone expected him to celebrate the end of the Wars.”

“He should have celebrated,” I say.

She smiles faintly, then nods. For a moment she looks away. I can see her make a decision. She takes a deep breath and uncrosses her arms.

“I agreed with you back then. I figured he should have been at his happiest. But he wasn’t so wrong about our jobs. I spent a lot of years as the chief surgeon on a military ship, and mostly I handled minor injuries and not-so-serious illness. But when we were in the middle of a battle, and the wounded kept pouring in, I just reacted.”

I nod, not wanting her to stop.

“I worked my ass off,” she says. “And people died.”

She leans back, and rests her wrist on the side of the table. “I never, ever counted how many people I saved. I still don’t. I suppose I can look it up. But I know to the person how many have died under my watch,” she says softly. “I’ll wager Ewing knew too. And each one of those deaths, they take something from you.”

A little piece of yourself
, I almost add. But I don’t want her to think I’m sympathizing falsely, and I’m not willing to reveal as much of myself to her as she has revealed of herself to me.

“He wouldn’t have been talking about death if he was going to go to those ceremonies,” she says. “He wouldn’t have been looking at the past. He would have been looking toward the future, at what we could build.”

She sounds so confident. Yet they were just lovers, in passing, on a military output. How well did she really know him, after all?

And how can I ask her that without insulting her further?

So I try a different tack, partly to take my mind off those irritating questions and partly because I want to know.

“You said it’s a pilgrimage. You said only the damned can get in.”

Her frown grows. “Have you never heard of the Room?”

“I know it,” I say, choosing my words carefully. “I just don’t know the legends.”

And I should. I used to believe that the legends were more important than “facts” or histories or stories they could verify. Because legends held a bit of truth.

“Do the damned go to get cleansed?” I ask.

Her mouth closes. She takes a breath, sighs, then gives me that faint smile all over again.

“Some say the Room bestows forgiveness on those who deserve it.” That faraway look appears in her eyes.

“And those who don’t?” I ask.

Tears well. She doesn’t brush at them, doesn’t even seem to notice them.