Damocles (26 page)

02:50:52. Cho moved to the door of Meg’s shelter, sticking his head inside the flap. He climbed inside, medical kit in hand. Moments later Meg emerged, rubbing her eyes against the sea wind and high orange light. She yawned and stretched her body
into an almost comically long pose, her arms jutting from her body in a crooked line. Loul watched, applauding himself for being so close on his calculations, and saw Meg jump, clutching her wrist where the wristband usually rested. Her gaze flew to their booth and Loul held up his hand in greeting. She blinked with that look she and the Urfers always seemed to wear when experiencing
morning
. As he knew she would, she waved back and headed for the Urfer waste station. Then she would get a water bag and either some
tut
or those strange green blocks and join him.

The Urfers stuck to their schedules. They had routines and rhythms. According to his calculations, Loul had only to wait until high orange began to fade into Fa-pale for the countdown to zero out. He’d know if his gut was right. He tried to prepare himself as he had all his life to be disappointed, to have overestimated the importance of what his imagination rendered, but the longer he spent on-site with the Urfers, the more faith he put in his gut. He knew that after Meg arose, Agnar would go down for his period of stasis. Agnar always waited for the signal from Meg and Cho that they were back on-site before heading into his shelter. This time, however, Meg and Prader finished in the waste station and signaled to the leader. He signaled back, and Loul watched the leader, Cheffson, and Cho all check their screens. Only two units of Urfer time remained on the clock. Nobody went down into stasis.

Meg was acting differently. It wasn’t just
morning
, and although he only understood part of what she said about Prader and stasis, he didn’t think that was what made her seem different. Maybe he was just reading into it; maybe staring at that countdown getting closer to zero had him imagining things. Meg’s long fingers fluttered more than usual and she didn’t so much sit in the booth as fidget lower and lower until she settled in place. Her thumb flicked at the refill valve of her water bag, and she kept squeezing the clear plastic, forcing the bubbles up and down. She smiled and made a happy sound when she saw the pictures of Urf on screen.

“Good, very good,” she said, pointing to a picture of rough sea underneath a multicolored sky, one lone sun sinking beneath the horizon. “Meg likes sea very much.” She waved her hand in the direction of the Ketter Sea, invisible but very much present behind the site. Normally Loul would have asked a question or picked another photograph or maybe even invited her to walk with him again to the edge of the work site where they could see the water beating against the rocks, but he couldn’t find it in himself to do any of those things. He couldn’t think about
anything but that countdown, and he wanted to see if Meg had noticed that he had noticed the numbers. If she had, she didn’t make any sign of it.

She also didn’t seem to notice the change in their conversation tempo. Her fingers flitted through commands and prompts, topics and directions changing in no discernible order. Loul kept up with her, keeping his answers simple, keeping questions to a minimum. He felt calm, which surprised him, since that ever-decreasing number seemed to tick off faster and faster the lower it got. A sense of inevitability misted down over him, a helplessness to whatever was going to happen as he watched Meg’s gaze flit around the work site, meeting the eyes of her crewmates. One to another, their gazes passed over the Dideto crews, never holding one spot too long but always flickering back to their work screens. Back, Loul just knew, to that countdown.

He saw the moment she knew she’d been found out. He’d asked an uninterested question about a large, leaping sea creature when Meg’s gaze had shifted to Cho. Cho had been staring in Meg’s direction, his long fingers pushing his lips back and forth. The Effans bustled around him and he didn’t seem to be listening. He didn’t seem to be looking at anything either until Meg turned her face to him. Nothing remarkable happened. There was no big change of expression, and if Loul hadn’t made a point of noticing how subtle the Urfers could be, he might not have noticed the gesture at all.

Cho had kept his fingers over his mouth, his elbow braced on the Effans’ high medical lab. When he and Meg locked gazes, he stopped rubbing his face. He stood very still, and Loul hardly even noticed when the longest finger on the Urfer’s hand, the middle one, slipped ever so slightly over the first finger. Just the tips crossed and only for a second, as if he were scratching an itch. It probably wouldn’t have registered at all if Loul hadn’t
chosen that moment to glance back at Meg, whose hand rested on the edge of the table. Her fluttering fingers stilled when she looked at Cho. As Loul watched her, the first two fingers of her right hand twisted, second over first. It didn’t look like a casual gesture when she did it. It didn’t look like scratching an itch, and when Cho saw her do it, he dropped his hand from his face and went back to work.

Loul didn’t move when Meg looked back at him. He didn’t scowl. He wasn’t angry. It was too late to be angry. He’d told Meg he trusted her; he had let the media think everything was fine. The Urfer time units were flying by too quickly for anything to be done to stop whatever was going to happen. Whatever those looks meant, whatever those twisted fingers signified, whatever the Urfers (the aliens, he reminded himself) were waiting for was going to be here in just a matter of heartbeats, and Loul felt oddly free of concern. Whatever it was, he told himself, at least he’d be the first to see it.

Meg sighed and brought her hand up between them. She twisted the fingers. “Yes?”

She knew he’d seen them. There was no point in pretending now. He pointed to the numbers ticking down in the corner of the screen. 00:12:04.

Meg bobbed her head. “Yes.” When Loul said nothing, that strange sense of peace and surrender stilling him, Meg rested her chin in her hands, staring at him. Loul thought back to the first time he’d seen her do that, just a few rounds ago, although it seemed like a lifetime, and he’d wondered at the time if their heads were too heavy for their thin necks to hold them up. He knew better now, of course. He knew those thin limbs and long muscles were deceptively strong. Deceptively.

Meg swept the light screen of the photographs, opening up a large blank box in the center. A big box usually meant a difficult
concept. Well, they had 00:09:54 time units to get there. Her fingers hovered over the screen, digging at the air the way they did when she looked for a way to start a concept. A thousand howling inevitabilities pounded in the back of his mind trying to predict the revelation she was about to share. Invasion, explosion, conquest, uprising, escape—all the things any comic-reading kid knew followed the end of a countdown, and yet Loul found himself drifting in a peaceful absence of concern. Probably denial, something whispered in his head, but at least he felt ready for anything.

Except that big white thing. Shaking her head and making a sound of impatience, Meg pulled the picture of the fat, white animal that had shown up on the screen when the computers had interfaced. “Turkey,” she said, jabbing at the image. “Turkey. Okay?”

He didn’t know what to say. So much for being ready for anything. Meg scrubbed her face with her hands the way Cho had been doing just moments before. Anxiety. That was the only thing the gesture brought to mind for Loul. Like they thought they could scrub unhappy thoughts out of their mind by scrubbing them off of their skin. After a few noisy breaths, Meg dropped her hands to the side of the screen, her fingers dancing lightly on the edges as she faced him. Her shoulders dropped, her head leaning forward in that full-body attention way she did. Loul felt himself responding automatically, her attention triggering his. 07:38:22.

“Loul need/wants turkey, okay?” She let one hand hover between the
yes
and
no
buttons, a sign that this wasn’t exactly what she meant, their unspoken way of saying “sort of” or “maybe” or even “hang on.” He tapped his knuckles.

“Okay.” He put his hand beside hers between the buttons. “Loul need/want turkey.” He had no idea why he would need or want that hideous thing, but he would give it a chance.

“Okay.” Meg took a deep breath, her fingers splayed over the screen. “Meg need/want Loul has turkey. Meg need/want to Loul need/want.” She shook her hands, her fingers fidgeting over the screen in that way that told Loul she was frustrated. Muttering to herself, she pulled up the audio/text combo boxes she had just pushed aside. Now that Cartar had filled in the boxes beneath them, Loul could read the boxes as she assembled them. She pointed to each box as she read it:

“Meg—need/want—Loul—need/want—turkey.”

“Why would you want me to want a turkey?” Loul asked, knowing it was the wrong question and that she couldn’t understand it anyway. Or maybe she did because she pushed down her palms in a gesture he’d come to know as “wait.”

“Turkey to Loul is okay/good.” She flipped the boxes in place, pointing as she spoke. “Loul need/want turkey.”

“Okay.” 05:15:48.

“Meg—need/want—okay/good—to Loul.” She touched Loul’s hand and then pressed her palms together in front of him. “Meg Loul.” She pressed her hands harder together. “Meg Loul okay/good, yes? Meg trust Loul. Loul trust Meg. Okay/good, yes?”

He felt a warmth rising around his face. He knew what she was saying, or he thought he did. She was assuring him that they were friends. Considering how fast the numbers were counting down, the assurance didn’t comfort him. But Meg continued, her focus drawing him in as always. “Yes. Meg Loul okay/good.”

She ran her finger along the string of text boxes. At the
need/want
box between Loul and the turkey, she pressed the audio. “Loul need/want.” Drawing her finger back to the text box between her name and his, she spoke again: “This need/want is…” and she made a sound he could barely hear. It sounded like a sigh or the rush of wind. He watched her mouth as the machine recorded her word but could only hear air pushed out between
her pursed lips. The program filled in the new text box with Urfer symbols, but because he couldn’t understand it and thus couldn’t translate it, the Cartar box remained empty. He let his knuckles fall away.

Meg bit her lip, seeing the gap in the program translation. She scrambled some more text boxes onto the screen. “Loul need/want turkey. Then Loul has turkey. This is good…” A few jabs at the screen and she recorded another word. She held up both hands, the second fingers twisted around the first in that gesture she and Cho had shared.

Loul stared at the text boxes. If he wanted a turkey and he got a turkey, it was this new word, this new gesture. He turned up the volume to hear more clearly and hit the buttons to play back the words.

“Loul get turkey. This is good luck.”

Meg held up her twisted fingers and glanced at the numbers as they sped toward zero. “Meg need/want good luck. Urfers need/want good luck.”

Loul didn’t think this had anything to do with turkeys.

00:00:00.

She could only imagine what he was thinking. He’d seen the numbers. Nothing good ever happened when a clock hit zero, at least not on Earth. He hadn’t pressed her, and for that she would be eternally grateful, but the blind, helpless trust he put in her was almost worse than an angry confrontation. His thrum had softened. She’d heard it changing, lessening, as if he were drawing away from her. It hadn’t been her imagination either. Nothing had changed with the Effans. Meg could hear them chattering
away as always, and Kik and his crew seemed as determined as ever to do their damage despite Prader’s distraction. Meg had heard Olum pound the table more than once trying to get a point across to Wagner. Jefferson dug and scraped his samples, but all of their minds were elsewhere.

Only Loul seemed to pick up on the distraction. Only Loul seemed to want to call Meg out on her evasion. She tried to tell herself she was just projecting, but one look in his hooded gray eyes and she knew he knew. She tried to teach him the word
wish
, but like the concept itself, the word was too soft, too ethereal for him to pick up. So she’d gone with
luck
. She didn’t know if he understood the concept or if the Dideto even had an equivalent word. It didn’t matter now. The timer hit zero. She and the rest of the crew were going to learn if they had any luck at all.

Loul didn’t stop her when she rose. He didn’t even seem surprised. She held her hands out, palm down, in an unnecessary gesture encouraging him to wait for her. He always waited for her. He’d never let his attention flicker from hers since their first encounter. As she slipped out of the booth she was grateful they hadn’t tackled the concept of loyalty.

Nobody needed to call out or signal. The five Earthers just moved as one to the clearing at the center of the site. Funny, Meg thought as they gathered in their usual circle, the whole site was packed with equipment and cables and work crews and yet this ring, this little five-foot circle, repelled clutter. She wasn’t even sure the Dideto even walked through it. Some patches of dirt just seemed to create their own energy.