Space Magic (27 page)

Mira herself, as even she would admit, was no beauty, having a long face and a substantial nose. She was fifty-one, the same age as me and a year younger than Gary. But she was a genius with clothing and make-up, her blue eyes crackled with intelligence, and her petite body hummed with creative energy. The substantial inheritance that supported her gravitics hobby didn’t reduce her allure, either. But she was a woman of powerful opinions and her temper was legendary. Perhaps that was why her girlfriends rarely lasted a year.

Most of the crowd focused on Babette, who swam through the air with a lithe unconscious grace as she unscrewed her helmet, but Gary ignored her; his eyes were locked on Mira as though she were a closing door between him and Paradise. Mira, in turn, divided her attention between admiring Babette and enjoying the crowd admiring Babette. She contained herself well when she noticed Gary, I’ll grant her that; she only nodded to him as she had to so many other old friends. But her eyes kept creeping back to him, then flicking away as she noticed he was still watching her.

Gradually the crowd broke apart, people forming knots of conversation, heading off for technical presentations, or wandering toward the bar. A few hours later I found myself at a gravity table in Foster’s, the habitat’s most expensive restaurant, with Mira, Babette, Connie... and Gary. I was surprised that Gary had wound up in Mira’s dinner group; perhaps one of their other old friends had nudged the two of them together.

The conversation was light and witty, focusing on the latest gravity hacker gossip and the details of the
Nautilus’s
construction, but the tension between Mira and Gary was palpable. Have you ever broken a magnet in half? The two halves, once a single unit that not only held itself together but drew other objects to itself, now repel each other. Mira and Gary were the same.

Service in Foster’s was abominable, as always, and we’d already finished a bottle and a half of wine when the appetizers came. Connie celebrated the waiter’s arrival with the traditional toast to Uncle Teco.

As we sipped, Babette asked, “So where is Uncle Teco, anyway?” Her voice had a cultured Southern sweetness, a slow expensive cadence that brought to mind cotillions among the magnolias.

Mira raised her glass to her lips, to hide her expression, and looked at Gary, who smirked and looked at me. It all took less than a second, and Babette didn’t seem to notice.

I cleared my throat and said, “Uncle Teco is a very busy man. I’m not surprised he wasn’t able to be there for your arrival, but I’m sure he’d love to meet you.”

“Probably stuck in a meeting with the habitat,” said Connie.

“Oh, that’s all right,” Babette drawled. “I’d hate to make a big important man like him waste his time with insignificant little ol’ me.”

“No, he’s a real sweetheart once you get to know him,” I said. “In fact... tell you what.” I reached in my pocket and found a data chip. “I meant to give him this the next time I saw him. Why don’t you give it to him for me? That’ll give you an excuse to introduce yourself. Oh, and it’s pronounced ‘Teeco.’ Only earthworms say ‘Tecko.’”

Babette’s eyes didn’t budge from mine as she tucked the chip in her décolletage. “That’s mighty considerate of you, Ken. But tell me now, what does he look like?”

Gary stepped into the gap. “Just ask anyone, they’ll tell you where he is.”

Babette nibbled her salad. “I can’t wait to meet him. There are so many people here that Mira’s told me all about, and they’re all so friendly.” She took a sip of her wine. “But Gary... you seem to know all the same people as Mira, but she’s never mentioned you. Isn’t that funny?” The statement seemed perfectly innocent, but in her eyes I saw a glint of the steel behind the magnolia. “And I keep hearing the name Janet Stein. Who’s she?”

Gary seemed to crystallize, his expression becoming cold and brittle. Connie’s mouth dropped open. Mira reached for the wine, but misjudged and knocked the bottle over. It rolled out of the table field and spun away, leaving a spiral of red droplets wobbling in the air behind it.

Gary didn’t notice the wine. “I can’t believe you didn’t even tell her,” he said to Mira. His words were ice-cold, but they boiled at the same time, like water leaking into vacuum.

Mira stared into her empty glass, clutching it with both hands. “I was going to. When the time was right.”

“How long have you known her?”

“Eight months,” said Babette.

“Eight months,” Gary repeated, still looking at Mira, “and you just couldn’t be bothered. Too busy with the present to acknowledge the past. How typical.”

“
I
couldn’t be bothered?” Mira’s voice didn’t get any louder, but her teeth were clenched. “Who
vanished
for ten years and then came waltzing back as though nothing had happened? Who left me and all our friends to pick up the pieces and move on?”

“It took me ten years to steel myself to see you again.” He stood up. “I see it wasn’t enough.” He stepped out of the table field too quickly and went into a tumble, splashing into a glob of wine the waiter hadn’t yet vacuumed up, but he caught himself on the floor with his hand, kicked off against a railing, and shot out of the restaurant.

The four of us stared at each other for a time. Then Mira raised her empty glass. “To
Chimera
.” Her voice barely quavered. Connie and I touched our glasses to hers, and they rang in the silence. There was still a little wine at the bottom of mine.

“Mira, honey,” said Babette, “Is there something you want to be telling me right about now?”

Mira rolled her glass around on the table with one finger. “Janet Stein died ten years ago,” she said at last. “Ten years ago this weekend, at this very habitat. TecoCon 15.
Chimera
was the biggest thing we’d ever done, the biggest thing anyone had ever done. It was too big. It fell apart.” She put her head down on the table. “Everything fell apart when Janet died,” she muttered into the tablecloth.

“Janet was...” I began, then backed up and tried again. “Janet and Mira and Gary, they were the greatest ship design team TecoCon ever saw, and
Chimera
was their masterpiece. It was like they were one person. Gary was the brains, he pushed the technological envelope. Mira was the heart, she had the artistic talent. Janet... Janet was the soul. The fulcrum.”

“I loved her,” Mira said almost too softly to hear. The tablecloth under her cheek was dark with moisture.

“Gary loved her too,” I said nearly as softly. “And she loved you both.”

“She had too much love for just one person.” Mira might have been talking to herself. “She had enough love to keep the three of us together. But with her gone, Gary and I spun off in different orbits.”

Connie poked at her French onion soup, which had cooled and congealed. “I can’t believe he came back after ten years.”

The waiter, who had been drifting nearby for some time, cleared his throat. “Would you like your entrees now, or would you rather wait for the gentleman to return?”

“Just bring us the check,” I told him. “I don’t think any of us are hungry any more.”

I went straight to my room after that, where I stayed up too late, emptying expensive little bottles from the mini-bar and staring down at the Earth, a clouded blue eye that blinked away tears every ninety minutes. But the next day, when I dragged myself to breakfast,
Edison
was still in the parking lot and Gary was giving an impromptu technical talk in the lobby. A bunch of new kids orbited around him like so many moons of Jupiter, enraptured by his history of the Yamaguchi coil.

A little while later he tracked me down in the Badger Hole, the habitat’s casual restaurant, where I was holding my head and trying to convince myself the habitat’s attempt at free-fall eggs was preferable to going hungry. “I suppose you’re surprised to see me still here,” he said.

“I have to admit I am, but I’m glad.”

“It was what Mira said about leaving our friends to pick up the pieces. She made me realize I would be hurting more than just her and myself if I went away again.”

“TecoCon really hasn’t been the same without you,” I said. “Join me for coffee?”

He attached himself to a sticky-strip next to me—no gravity tables in the Badger Hole—and we sat shoulder-to-shoulder, talking earnestly about old friends and looking out at the broad expanse of the viewing lobby. We had a good view of the Earth rolling by, the parking lot full of ships of all sizes and descriptions, and the members of the convention moving between program items or just drifting and talking.

“Hey, there’s Babette,” I said
sotto voce
, indicating her with a slight motion of my chin.

She was earnestly going from one group to another, her native grace warring with her obvious inexperience in free-fall, asking each the same question. Younger people shrugged or just looked puzzled; older ones gestured emphatically in different directions, and grinned at her back after she left them.

“Still looking for Uncle Teco,” Gary said.

I watched her pilgrimage for a while before replying. “I feel a little bad about it.”

“Maybe it’s time to call off the snipe hunt.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe it is.”

We paid our tab, then looked around to see where Babette had gotten to. I spotted her first; she was pacing back and forth on the gravity landing in front of the men’s restroom. She waved at us, rather frantically, and we pushed off from the Badger Hole and headed in her direction. As we floated toward her I wondered what the trouble might be.

Then Mira emerged from the women’s restroom, and greeted Babette with a peck on the cheek. She hadn’t spotted us yet, but she would in a moment, and I really didn’t know what would happen then. Gary had calmed down quite a bit since last night, but there was no telling what Mira might do—I’d hoped to be able to talk with the two of them separately before trying to bring them together again.

So I was thinking more about interpersonal than orbital dynamics when the impact occurred.

We later learned it was a piece of the old Prosperity station, thrown out of its orbit by a close encounter with an unauthorized heavy tripper. If we’d been at the Hilton it would have been vaporized by antimeteorite lasers, but TecoCon didn’t have the money for the Hilton, and the Black Lion Inn was too old and too cheap for a comprehensive space junk defense. So a couple hundred kilos of plastic and metal slammed right into the lobby’s big viewing window, splaying a white spiderweb of cracks all the way across it.

The sound of the impact was like five crystal chandeliers all crashing to the ground at once. For a moment after that there was a breath-holding silence, but then came a sound I hope never to hear again—a groaning, creaking, and crackling, accompanied by a sharp increasing hiss of escaping air, as the fractured window began to bulge outward.

“Oh, shit,” Gary said, just before the klaxons started.

Most of the TecoCon people were experienced space hands. They reacted quickly and with minimal panic, scrambling quickly for exits and refuges as emergency doors began to slide closed. But Babette and Mira stayed right where they were, arguing over something. We would be there in just a few more seconds, but by the time we arrived it might be too late to make it to the nearest exit before the doors sealed.

Gary reached over and gave me a shove, propelling himself toward Babette and Mira, and me toward the nearest emergency door. I had enough velocity to reach it before it closed.

Leaving Gary, Mira, and Babette behind.

I grabbed an aluminum cross-brace and reversed my course. A moment later I was stumbling into the gravity field of the men’s room landing.

“Couldn’t reach it,” I said.

I never could get a lie past Gary. “Damn fool,” he said, and shook his head.

Mira pounded on the men’s room door actuator with the heel of her hand. “Someone’s trapped in there,” she said, “and the door’s stuck!”

“Leave it!” said Babette, tugging at Mira’s sleeve. “There’s no—”

Gary pushed both women away from the door. “It’s the pressure drop.” He licked his palm, slapped it over a grille on the door’s control panel, and pressed hard, pushing the actuator with his other hand. The door slid open—he’d fooled it into opening by raising the pressure at the sensor. “Hello!” he called, holding the door open, but no answer came back.

“We’ll have to get him out!” said Mira, and ran inside.

Babette’s panic only deepened. “Mira! Come back!”

Gary looked back at the shattered window and closing emergency doors. “No more time!” He grabbed Babette’s arm and ran into the bathroom with her. I followed.

The door slid shut. A moment later came a sound like a greenhouse being torn in half, and then—silence.

The silence of vacuum.

The door strained against its seals as though someone large, heavy, and invisible were leaning against it from this side. It was airtight, like any door in an orbital habitat, but this restroom wasn’t a designated blowout refuge so there was no guarantee it would stay that way.

Gary, Mira, and Babette lay gasping in a heap on the tile floor. I leaned heavily against the wall and slid down to a sitting position, clutching my knees to my chest to keep my hammering heart from bursting right out of my ribcage.

“That was too close,” I said at last.

“Everyone all right?” asked Mira.

Gary said, “I’m okay, but my phone’s dead. The local repeater must have been damaged in the blowout.”

While Babette and I checked our phones—equally dead—Mira peered under the partitions into the stalls. There were two of them, and two urinals; there was no other exit, and no place for a person to hide. “Where is he?”

I had a horrible thought. “Mira, did you actually see anyone go in here?”

“No, but Babette told me she was waiting for someone to come out...”

Gary’s face showed he’d had the same thought as me.

We all looked at Babette. Her face was stony. “Yes. It was Uncle Teco.”

“Oh God,” said Gary, and he shook his head slowly. Mira sighed heavily and put her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook, but I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying. Maybe both.