Cosmic Hotel (16 page)

He explained to Ruth what had taken place downstairs. His theory, he said, was that someone was harassing him, and he waited for her to show some sign of guilt.

“Who else have you told about this?” she asked.

“No one,” he said. “I did tell my son.”

“Which one?”

“Sandeep.”

“The one with money. Not the priest?”

“He wouldn't have told anyone,” he said.

“How do you know?” Ruth held the cigarette beside her head to think. “Someone else obviously knows what you've found,” she said. “The dish has logs. Someone can go through them.”

“That won't tell anyone anything. It was a scan. It scanned large sections of the sky. This makes me anxious. Time is running out.”

“For what?” Ruth asked him.

“I don't know.” Van Raye got on the bed, flat on his stomach, took his glasses off.

“Tell me how this would make you feel,” she asked, “if the dog thing, this problem, just disappeared?”

“Problem? Don't change this to
your
problem.” He sighed, not in the mood to be analyzed by the space station's chief of biomedical problems. She was, ironically he thought, her own biomedical problem.

She went to her duffle bag and pulled something out. “I guess I should give this to you.” It was a box about the shape of a coffee grinder, orange. She tested the weight and then underhanded it to him. The orange box flashed through a streak of sunshine and came toward the bed. He rolled, and it bounced heavy, and he put a hand to stop it from falling off the bed.

“Jesus!” he said. “What are you trying to do? What is this?”

There were two white stripes around the box, a handle on one end, Cyrillic letters and multipronged, female outlets on the side.

“Is this what I think it is?” he said. He had to retrieve his eyeglasses from the floor. “You've had this all along?”

“Courtesy of Roscosmos. It was a backup unit.”

“Jesus, there was a
backup
?” He held it in both hands. “Do you know how much this little orange box is worth?” he said.

“That's not the point. It's a loaner until we . . . I don't know what . . . until we finish. You do want to send something yourself, don't you? That's what this delay is about, right?”

“Yes. Don't throw it around!” he said.

“It's for you. From me. I'm guessing we can use a dish as small, as what, two meters?” She stared out the window, letting the smoke rise from the cigarette. “Sending something? A message from you? It's not going to reach Chava until long after you're dead. That's so unlike you.” She turned her head sideways.

“Why not? Isn't it normal to want to send something real before the others do?”

“When do you care about something that will be around long after you're dead? You'll get no reward from sending a message. That signal will take three thousand years to reach the planet. You'll be dust. I know you and there has to be something you want now, from sending a signal now.”

He took the gain booster and put it gently on the desk and stared at it.

“I want to send my own message before the others get theirs off. That's simple.”

She blew smoke toward the outside world. “My God,” she said. The smoke balled in the air. “Yes, the size of your ego never fails to impress me. I don't have the software, by the way. If we don't have the software that thing's nothing more than an anchor for a boat.”

“We can get the software, can't we?”

“Yes, I have someone on board who would be willing to trust me with it. He'll send it to me if I ask.”

“The father?” he said.

“What difference does that make?” She stretched her neck.

He sat on the edge of the bed. “Ruth, you have to tell me something. Are you responsible for the dog thing?”

She took a second then smirked, stepped back to the window, the sun on her face. The curtains flapped on both sides of the doorway and she gazed into the canopy of trees.

“Darling,” he said gently, “someone will see you standing there like that, come here.”

She picked up one of her breasts and inspected it and let it drop, sucked on the cigarette. “Why do you think I would harass you? What would my motive be for doing something as contrived as this? I've got other things on my mind.” Her face was beautiful in the light. Her hair, he thought, would grow out and be beautiful again soon.

She leaned against the doorframe and crossed one foot over the other. There was a bruise on the back of her leg that had been there since she'd disrobed that first night, something suffered on reentry or during the caravan journey out of Mongolia.

“I have nothing to do with the dog,” she said. “You've never had anything bad happen to you, have you?”

“My mother died when I was twelve. I never knew my father.” Van Raye was looking at the dirty underside of her foot and had been thinking of something his mother always said. His mother called black-soled feet “7-Eleven feet.”

“Boo-hoo,” Ruth said, “there's that, but you've gotten everything you've ever wanted. You're an expert in your field. You've written books that people actually read. Women throw themselves at you. You hold court at every party you attend, but you don't have any family. Are you okay with that?”

“Don't torture me with your analysis. Ruth, why are you here?” he asked. “In this state, why did you come to
me
?”

“I am still employed by this university,” she said. “And my car was here.”

“You hate that car. You're eighteen weeks pregnant.”

“Nineteen. I came to you, I think, because you're the only other one. You're like me, having a family is not your first priority, and you're all I have to help me figure this out.”

“Nineteen weeks?” he said.

She nodded.

Van Raye got that helpless feeling of an approaching deadline. “Are you at a point when you can't make a decision?” he said.

She flicked the cigarette out the door into the backyard.

“No. Not quite.”

“But you need to be making arrangements?”

“
Stop
,” she said, “okay, I get it. I'm not mother material. I know that.”

She came and crawled over him and pinned him down by the shoulders. She had one knee up against his crotch and looked down at him. “I'm not the most nurturing person on the planet,” she said.

Something like a bundle of wood clattered on the floor downstairs.

“I'm not the most nurturing person either,” he said.

“Exactly. What's the matter with us?”

“Ruth, some people are here for other reasons. Some people have bigger reasons. We've been burdened with this task, not anything else.”

Her eyes were ringed with black construction dust; the dirt and grime surrounding her eyes had been smeared.

“Have you been crying?” he said.

“No.”

The dust covered everything in the house and it was probably on his skin too, and she was breathing it in.

“Why don't you make arrangements, go somewhere?” he said.

She rolled off of him and on her back. She whispered while touching her stomach, “Because I hear something.”

“You what?”

She took a deep breath. “I know it's not real, okay? I know what audio hallucinations are. But anyway, to me, I hear music.”

“You're hearing the music from downstairs.”

“No,” she said. “It's different music. It's comes from inside me. I feel it too, like vibrations. Like music-box music.”

“Sweetheart,” he said, matching her quiet tone, “you have been through a lot.”

There was only the light coming through the curtains flapping in the breeze.

“You are hallucinating because your mind, well,” he said, “you're overloaded. You're struggling, and you have conflicting instincts. Your mind is looking for some way for there to be something that will make you feel better about having feelings for this . . .” He waved his hand over her belly.

“Fetus?” she said.

The room was silent. The curtains still.

“Are you hearing it now?” he said.

“Maybe. I shouldn't have told you.”

He said, “I can assure you that in reality, there is no music.” His ear was against her chest. “There's no music.”

“How do you know? You're on the outside.”

When Ruth had been aboard the spacecraft
Infinity
, and she'd found out she was pregnant—this was after she'd listened to the broadcast for Van Raye—she'd started packing to come back to Earth, stuffing personal items in her bag, and then grabbed the gain amplifier just in time because Cosmonaut X stuck his head in her quarters and asked what she was doing.

No one knew her condition, especially not him.

“Leaving,” she said, fanning away a group of monarchs fluttering about her cabin. Her sleeping bag was hung on the wall like a giant chrysalis itself, butterflies decorating its outside, hundreds of pulsing wings. It was nearly impossible not to occasionally smash a butterfly, and the crew was constantly vacuuming up carcasses, an experiment on growth and flight that had gotten out of control.

Ruth floated her duffle down the trans-tube, then followed it, and then Cosmonaut X followed her to the bay where orange monarchs were disturbed into confetti fluttering up, down, and sideways. She braced her feet on each side of the escape pod's hatch and strained to open it.

Cosmonaut X went to the intercom and said, “We have a crew member loading her things into the emergency capsule.”

In seconds the other five crewmembers were watching her entering information on the computer.

“It's been rough on everyone,” Jane said.

“I can't do it again right now,” Ruth said, “I just can't.”

The station began emerging from Earth's shadow and the sunlight hit the station's skin and began creaking.

Cosmonaut X floated in the high corner, arms folded. Ruth stuck her head in the escape capsule and scanned to make sure there were no butterflies there. What would butterflies born in zero gravity think of gravity?

“You volunteered for that walk,” Jane said. “You don't have to go out anymore, okay? Don't do this.”

Ruth's hair floated like the Bride of Frankenstein. “It's not that,” she said. “I've got other reasons.”

There was a loud pop as the sunlight intensity peaked on the space station's exterior.

Ruth quickly gripped the handle and went into the capsule feet-first, stuck her head back out like an angry gopher. “There's shit going on that none of you can imagine. I'm getting the hell out of here. There are two more seats on this thing, anyone else want out?”

No one spoke.

“Then start the sequence.” She reached to pull the hatch closed but the leverage was awkward.

“That is a big mass,” Cosmonaut X said, not uncrossing his arms, as if the hatch would stop her.

“You don't know where you'll come down,” Jane said. “Give us twenty to come up with trajectories.”

“And then I'll have to wait for a window and have time to think about this? No.” She struggled with the heavy hatch but no one helped until finally Cosmonaut X pushed himself off the wall in a flutter of butterflies and grabbed the hatch. He touched her hand first. “Because of me?” he said.

“Jesus, don't flatter yourself.” His flight suit was smeared with more black protoplasm than the others. “A port in a storm,” she whispered, looking around to see if anyone else heard or understood this slight of intimacy.

When the hatch was shut, through the round window she saw everyone exiting the airlock. In six minutes, after she was buckled in and the pressure had fallen inside the airlock, she watched through the porthole as the butterflies froze into unrecognizable specks, and when the pod separated from the station and the tiny boosters hissed, stabilizing her into a decaying orbit Earthward. The computers came up with an emergency-landing target, and she heard Uree over the com say, “How's your Mongolian?” and the signal faded as
Infinity
continued over Earth's horizon and Ruth's pod fell behind like a dropped
buoy and her porthole began to glow in the fire that separated space and Earth, and she felt the first g grab her in her center of mass where it always started, in her gut near where this thing lived inside her, and the pod began shaking, and Ruth began grunting, contracting the muscles in her stomach and legs. She had always grunted “monster” when reentering. Everyone had his or her own g-load word to grunt. She grunted “
monster
” to dam the blood flow in her head—“
Mmmmmmm-onster . . .
” taking a quick breath and repeating, straining, “
Mmm
-
onstersss
.” She flinched when something fell out of the instrument panel, and she watched the cosmopolitan butterfly beat dying in the crook of her arm as she began to pass out.