Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (32 page)

“No,” Lorimer says, “not a single iguana.”

“They promised us a Shetland pony for Christmas,” says Bud, rattling gravel. Andy joins perplexedly in the laugh.

Lorimer’s head is foggy; it isn’t only fatigue, the year in
Sunbird
has atrophied his ability to take in novelty. Numbly he uses the Woolagong, and they go back out and forward to
Gloria
’s big control room, where Dave makes a neat short speech to Luna and is answered graciously.

“We have to finish changing course now,” Lady Blue says. Lorimer’s impression has been right, she is a small light part-Negro in late middle age. Connie is part something exotic too, he sees; the others are European types.

“I’ll get you something to eat,” Connie smiles warmly. “Then you probably want to rest. We saved all the cubbies for you.” She says “syved”; their accents are all identical.

As they leave the control room, Lorimer sees the withdrawn look in Dave’s eyes and knows he must be feeling the reality of being a passenger in an alien ship; not in command, not deciding the course, the communications going on unheard.

That is Lorimer’s last coherent observation, that and the taste of the strange, good food. And then being led aft through what he now knows is the gym, to the shaft of the sleeping drum. There are six irised ports like dog-doors; he pushes through his assigned port and finds himself facing a roomy mattress. Shelves and a desk are in the wall.

“For your excretions.” Connie’s arm comes through the iris, pointing at bags. “If you have a problem stick your head out and call. There’s water.”

Lorimer simply drifts toward the mattress, too sweated out to reply. His drifting ends in a curious heavy settling and his final astonishment: the drum is smoothly, silently starting to revolve. He sinks gratefully onto the pad, growing “heavier” as the minutes pass. About a tenth gee, maybe more, he thinks, it’s still accelerating. And falls into the most restful sleep he has known in the long weary year.

It isn’t till next day that he understands that Connie and two others have been on the rungs of the gym chamber, sending it around hour after hour without pause or effort and chatting as they went.

How they talk, he thinks again, floating back to real present time. The bubbling irritant pours through his memory, the voices of Ginny and Jenny and Penny on the kitchen telephone, before that his mother’s voice, his sister Amy’s. Interminable. What do they always have to talk, talk, talk of?

“Why, everything,” says the real voice of Connie beside him now, “it’s natural to share.”

“Natural . . .” Like ants, he thinks. They twiddle their antennae together every time they meet. Where did you go, what did you do? Twiddle-twiddle. How to you
feel?
Oh, I feel this, I feel that, blah blah twiddle-twiddle. Total coordination of the hive. Women have no self-respect. Say anything, no sense of the strategy of words, the dark danger of naming. Can’t hold in.

“Ants, beehives,” Connie laughs, showing the bad tooth. “You truly see us as insects, don’t you? Because they’re females?”

“Was I talking aloud? I’m sorry.” He blinks away dreams.

“Oh, please don’t be. It’s so sad to hear about your sister and your children and your, your wife. They must have been wonderful people. We think you’re very brave.”

But he has only thought of Ginny and them all for an instant—what has he been babbling? What is the drug doing to him?

“What are you doing to us?” he demands, lanced by real alarm now, almost angry.

“It’s all right, truly.” Her hand touches his, warm and somehow shy. “We all use it when we need to explore something. Usually it’s pleasant. It’s a laevonoramine compound, a disinhibitor, it doesn’t dull you like alcohol. We’ll be home so soon, you see. We have the responsibility to understand, and you’re so locked in.” Her eyes melt at him. “You don’t feel sick, do you? We have the antidote.”

“No . . .” His alarm has already flowed away somewhere. Her explanation strikes him as reasonable enough. “We’re not locked in,” he says or tries to say. “We talk. . . .” He gropes for a word to convey the judiciousness, the adult restraint. Objectivity, maybe? “We talk when we have something to say.” Irrelevantly he thinks of a mission coordinator named Forrest, famous for his blue jokes. “Otherwise it would all break down,” he tells her. “You’d fly right out of the system.” That isn’t quite what he means; let it pass.

The voices of Dave and Bud ring out suddenly from opposite ends of the cabin, awakening the foreboding of evil in his mind. They don’t know us, he thinks. They should look out, stop this. But he is feeling too serene, he wants to think about his own new understanding, the pattern of them all he is seeing at last.

“I feel lucid,” he manages to say, “I want to think.”

She looks pleased. “We call that the ataraxia effect. It’s so nice when it goes that way.”

Ataraxia, philosophical calm. Yes. But there are monsters in the deep, he thinks or says. The night side. The night side of Orren Lorimer, a self hotly dark and complex, waiting in leash. They’re so vulnerable. They don’t know we can take them. Images rush up: a Judy spread-eagled on the gym rungs, pink pajamas gone, open to him. Flash sequence of the three of them taking over the ship, the women tied up, helpless, shrieking, raped, and used. The team—get the satellite station, get a shuttle down to Earth. Hostages. Make them do anything, no defense whatever. . . . Has Bud actually said that? But Bud doesn’t know, he remembers. Dave knows they’re hiding something, but he thinks it’s socialism or sin. When they find out. . . .

How has he himself found out? Simply listening, really, all these months. He listens to their talk much more than the others; “fraternizing,” Dave calls it. . . . They all listened at first, of course. Listened and looked and reacted helplessly to the female bodies, the tender bulges so close under the thin, tantalizing clothes, the magnetic mouths and eyes, the smell of them, their electric touch. Watching them touch each other, touch Andy, laughing, vanishing quietly into shared bunks.
What goes on? Can I? My need, my need—

The power of them, the fierce resentment . . . Bud muttered and groaned meaningfully despite Dave’s warnings. He kept needling Andy until Dave banned all questions. Dave himself was noticeably tense and read his Bible a great deal. Lorimer found his own body pointing after them like a famished hound, hoping to Christ the cubicles are as they appeared to be, unwired.

All they learn is that Myda’s instructions must have been ferocious. The atmosphere has been implacably antiseptic, the discretion impenetrable. Andy politely ignored every probe. No word or act has told them what, if anything, goes on; Lorimer was irresistibly reminded of the weekend he spent at Jenny’s scout camp. The men’s training came presently to their rescue, and they resigned themselves to finishing their mission on a super-
Sunbird
, weirdly attended by a troop of boy and girl scouts.

In every other way their reception couldn’t be more courteous. They have been given the run of the ship and their own dayroom in a cleaned-out gravel storage pod. They visit the control room as they wish. Lady Blue and Andy give them specs and manuals and show them every circuit and device of
Gloria
, inside and out. Luna has bleeped up a stream of science texts and the data on all their satellites and shuttles and the Mars and Luna dome colonies.

Dave and Bud plunged into an orgy of engineering.
Gloria
is, as they suspected, powered by a fission plant that uses a range of Lunar minerals. Her ion drive is only slightly advanced over the experimental models of their own day. The marvels of the future seem so far to consist mainly of ingenious modifications.

“It’s primitive,” Bud tells him. “What they’ve done is sacrifice everything to keep it simple and easy to maintain. Believe it, they can hand-feed fuel. And the backups, brother! They have redundant redundancy.”

But Lorimer’s technical interest soon flags. What he really wants is to be alone awhile. He makes a desultory attempt to survey the apparently few new developments in his field, and finds he can’t concentrate. What the hell, he tells himself, I stopped being a physicist three hundred years ago. Such a relief to be out of the cell of
Sunbird
; he has given himself up to drifting solitary through the warren of the ship, using their excellent 400-mm telescope, noting the odd life of the crew.

When he finds that Lady Blue likes chess, they form a routine of biweekly games. Her personality intrigues him; she has reserve and an aura of authority. But she quickly stops Bud when he calls her “Captain.”

“No one here commands in your sense. I’m just the oldest.” Bud goes back to “ma’am.”

She plays a solid positional game, somewhat more erratic than a man but with occasional elegant traps. Lorimer is astonished to find that there is only one new chess opening, an interesting queen-side gambit called the Dagmar. One new opening in three centuries? He mentions it to the others when they come back from helping Andy and Judy Paris overhaul a standby converter.

“They haven’t done much anywhere,” Dave says. “Most of your new stuff dates from the epidemic, Andy, if you’ll pardon me. The program seems to be stagnating. You’ve been gearing up this Titan project for eighty years.”

“We’ll get there.” Andy grins.

“C’mon, Dave,” says Bud. “Judy and me are taking on you two for the next chicken dinner, we’ll get a bridge team here yet. Woo-ee, I can taste that chicken! Losers get the iguana.”

The food is so good. Lorimer finds himself lingering around the kitchen end, helping whoever is cooking, munching on their various seeds and chewy roots as he listens to them talk. He even likes the iguana. He begins to put on weight, in fact they all do. Dave decrees double exercise shifts.

“You going to make us
climb
home, Dave-o?” Bud groans. But Lorimer enjoys it, pedaling or swinging easily along the rungs while the women chat and listen to tapes. Familiar music: he identifies a strange spectrum from Handel, Brahms, Sibelius, through Strauss to ballad tunes and intricate light jazz-rock. No lyrics. But plenty of informative texts doubtless selected for his benefit.

From the promised short history he finds out more about the epidemic. It seems to have been an airborne quasi-virus escaped from Franco-Arab military labs, possibly potentiated by pollutants.

“It apparently damaged only the reproductive cells,” he tells Dave and Bud. “There was little actual mortality, but almost universal sterility. Probably a molecular substitution in the gene code in the gametes. And the main effect seems to have been on the men. They mention a shortage of male births afterward, which suggests that the damage was on the Y chromosome where it would be selectively lethal to the male fetus.”

“Is it still dangerous, Doc?” Dave asks. “What happens to us when we get back home?”

“They can’t say. The birthrate is normal now, about two percent and rising. But the present population may be resistant. They never achieved a vaccine.”

“Only one way to tell,” Bud says gravely. “I volunteer.”

Dave merely glances at him. Extraordinary how he still commands, Lorimer thinks. Not submission, for Pete’s sake. A team.

The history also mentions the riots and fighting which swept the world when humanity found itself sterile. Cities bombed, and burned, massacres, panics, mass rapes and kidnapping of women, marauding armies of biologically desperate men, bloody cults. The crazies. But it is all so briefly told, so long ago. Lists of honored names. “We must always be grateful to the brave people who held the Denver Medical Laboratories—” And then on to the drama of building up the helium supply for the dirigibles.

In three centuries it’s all dust, he thinks. What do I know of the hideous Thirty Years’ War that was three centuries back for me?
Fighting devastated Europe for two generations.
Not even names.

The description of their political and economic structure is even briefer. They seem to be, as Myda had said, almost ungoverned.

“It’s a form of loose social credit-system run by consensus,” he says to Dave. “Somewhat like a permanent frontier period. They’re building up slowly. Of course they don’t need an army or air force. I’m not sure if they even use cash money or recognize private ownership of land. I did notice one favorable reference to early Chinese communalism,” he adds, to see Dave’s mouth set. “But they aren’t tied to a community. They travel about. When I asked Lady Blue about their police and legal system, she told me to wait and talk with real historians. This Registry seems to be just that, it’s not a policy organ.”

“We’ve run into a situation here, Lorimer,” Dave says soberly. “Stay away from it. They’re not telling the story.”

“You notice they never talk about their husbands?” Bud laughs. “I asked a couple of them what their husbands did, and I swear they had to think. And they all have kids. Believe me, it’s a swinging scene down there, even if old Andy acts like he hasn’t found out what it’s for.”

“I don’t want any prying into their personal family lives while we’re on this ship, Geirr. None whatsoever. That’s an order.”

“Maybe they don’t have families. You ever hear ’em mention anybody getting married? That has to be the one thing on a chick’s mind. Mark my words, there’s been some changes made.”

“The social mores are bound to have changed to some extent,” Lorimer says. “Obviously you have women doing more work outside the home, for one thing. But they have family bonds; for instance, Lady Blue has a sister in an aluminum mill and another in health. Andy’s mother is on Mars and his sister works in Registry. Connie has a brother or brothers on the fishing fleet near Biloxi, and her sister is coming out to replace her here next trip, she’s making yeast now.”

“That’s the top of the iceberg.”

“I doubt the rest of the iceberg is very sinister, Dave.”

But somewhere along the line the blandness begins to bother Lorimer too. So much is missing. Marriage, love affairs, children’s troubles, jealousy squabbles, status, possessions, money problems, sicknesses, funerals even—all the daily minutiae that occupied Ginny and her friends seems to have been edited out of these women’s talk.
Edited?
Can Dave be right, is some big, significant aspect being deliberately kept from them?