Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (53 page)

“Do you realize this isn’t games, Lor? Our lives are depending on it. Real people’s lives, much as you hate humanity. You better not be playing.”

“I don’t hate humanity, I just hate some of the things people do. I wouldn’t
hurt
people, Arn.”

“You’d liquidate ninety percent of the race to achieve your utopia.”

“What a terrible thing to say!”

Her face is all soul, he aches for her. But Torquemada was trying to help people, too.

“Lor, give me your word that Kuh and his people are absolutely okay. Your faithful word.”

“They
are
, Arn. I give you my word. They’re beautiful.”

“The hell with beauty. Are they physically okay?”

“Of course they are.”

Her eyes still have that look, but he can’t think of anything else to try. Praise be for Yellaston’s caution.

She reaches out for him, thin electric hand burning his. “You’ll see, Arn. Isn’t it wonderful, we’ll be together? That’s what kept me going, all the way back. I’ll be there tomorrow when we look at it.”

“Oh, no!”

“Jan Ing wants me. You said I’m medically fit. I’m his chief botanist, remember?” She smiles mischievously.

“I don’t think you should, Lor. Your ulcers.”

“Waiting around would be much worse for them.” She sobers, grips his arm. “Captain Yellaston—he’s going to send the green, isn’t he?”

“Ask him yourself. I’m only the doctor.”

“How sad. Oh, well, he’ll see. You’ll all see.” She pats his arm, turns away.

“
What
’ll we see?”

“How harmless it is, of course. . . . Listen, Arn. This is from some ancient work, the martyr Robert Kennedy quoted it before he was killed. ‘To tame the savage heart of man, to make gentle the life of this world’ . . . Isn’t that fine?”

“Yeah, that’s fine, Lor.”

He goes away less than comforted, thinking, the life of this world is not gentle, Lory. It wasn’t gentleness that got you out here. It was the drives of ungentle, desperate, glory-hunting human apes. The fallible humanity you somehow can’t see. . . .

He finds he has taken a path through the main Commons. Under the displays the nightly bridge and poker games are in session as usual, but neither Don nor Tim is visible. As he goes out of earshot he hears the Israeli physicist ante what sounds like an island. An island? He climbs up toward the clinic, hoping he heard wrong.

Solange is waiting for him with the medical log. He recites Ray and Bachi’s data with his head leaning against her warm front, remembering he has another problem. Forget it, he tells himself, I have two years to worry about Bustamente.

“Soli, tomorrow I want to rig up an array of decontaminant canisters over the examination area. With the release at my station. Say a good strong phytocide plus a fungicide with a mercury base. What should I get from Stores?”

“Decon Seven is the strongest, Aaron. But it cannot be mixed, we will have to place many tanks.” Her face is mirroring pity for the hypothetically killed plants, concern for the crew.

“Okay, so we’ll place many tanks. Everything the suits will take. I don’t trust that thing.”

Soli comes into his arms, holds him with her strong small hands. Peace, comfort.
To make gentle the life of mankind.
His body has missed her painfully, demonstrates it with a superior erection. Soli giggles. Fondly he caresses her, feeling like himself for the first time in weeks. Do I see you as property, Soli? Surely not . . . The thought of Bustamente’s huge body covering her floats through his mind; his erection increases markedly. Maybe the big black brother will have to revise his planning, Aaron thinks genially, hobbling with her to his comfortable, comforting bunk. Two years is a long time. . . .

Drifting asleep with Soli’s warm buttocks in his lap Aaron has a neutral, almost comic, hypnagogic vision: Tighe’s face big as the wall, garlanded with fruits and flowers like an Italian bambino plaque. The pink-and-green flowers tinkle, chime elfland horns.
Tan tara!
Centripetal melodies.
Tan tara! Tara! TARA!

—and fairy horns turn into his medical alarm signal, with Soli shaking him awake. The call is from the bridge.

He leaps out of bed, yanking shorts on, hits the doorway with one shoulder and runs “up” to the free-fall shaft. His kit is somehow in his hand. He has no idea what time it is. The thought that Yellaston has had a heart attack is scaring him to death. Oh, god, what will they do without Yellaston?

He kicks free, sails and grabs clumsily like a three-legged ape, clutching the kit, is so busy figuring alternative treatment spectrums that he almost misses the voices coming from the Commo corridor. He gets himself into the access, finds his feet and scurries “down,” still so preoccupied that he does not at first identify the dark columns occupying the Communications step. They are Bustamente’s legs.

Aaron pushes in past him and confronts a dreadful sight. Commander Timofaev Bron is sagging from Bustamente’s grasp, bleeding briskly from his left eye.

“All right, all right,” Tim mutters. Bustamente shakes him. “What the hell was that power drain?” Don Purcell comes in behind Aaron.

“This booger was sending,” Bustamente growls. “Shit-eater, I was too slow. He was sending
on my beam
.” He shakes the Russian again.

“All right,” Tim repeats unemotionally. “It is done.”

The blood is coming from a supraorbital split. Aaron disengages Tim from Bustamente, sits him down with his head back to clamp the wound. As he opens his kit a figure comes slowly through the side door from Astrogation: Captain Yellaston.

“Sir—” Aaron is still confusedly thinking of that coronary. Then Yellaston’s peculiar rigidity gets through to him. Oh, Jesus, no. The man is not sick but smashed to the gills.

Bustamente is yanking open the gyro housing. The room fills with a huge humming tone.

“I did not harm the beam,” Tim says under Aaron’s hands. “Certain equipment was installed when we built it; you did not look carefully enough.”

“Son of a bitch,” says Don Purcell.

“What do you mean, equipment?” Bustamente’s voice rises, harmonic with the precessing gyros. “What have you done, flyboy?”

“I was not sent here to wait. The planet is there.”

Aaron sees Captain Yellaston’s lips moving effortfully, achieving a strange pursed look. “You indicated . . .” he says eerily. “You indicated . . . that is, you have preempted the green. . . .”

The others stare at him, look away one by one. Aaron is stabbed with unbearable pity, he is suspecting that what has happened is so terrible it isn’t real yet.

“Son of a bitch,” Don Purcell repeats neutrally.

The green signal has been sent
, Aaron realizes. To the Russians, anyway, but everybody will find out, everybody will start. It’s all over, he’s committed us whether that planet’s any good or not. Oh, god, Yellaston—he saw this coming, if he’d been younger, if he’d moved faster—if half his brains hadn’t been scrambled in alcohol. I brought it to him.

Automatically his hands have completed their work. The Russian gets up. Don Purcell has left, Bustamente is probing the gyro chamber with a resonator, not looking at Tim. Yellaston is still rigid in the shadows.

“It was in the hull shielding,” Tim says to Bustamente. “The contact is under the toggles. Don’t worry, it was one-time.”

Aaron follows him out, unable to believe in any of this. Lieutenant Pauli is waiting outside; she must be in it, too.

“Tim, how could you be so goddamn sure? You may have killed everybody.”

The cosmonaut looks down at him calmly, one-eyed. “The records don’t lie. They are enough, we will find nothing else. That old man would have waited forever.” He chuckles, a dream-planet in his eye.

Aaron goes back in, leads Yellaston to his quarters. The captain’s arm is trembling faintly. Aaron is trembling too with pity and disgust. That old man, Tim had called him. That old man . . . Suddenly he realizes the full dimensions of this night’s disaster.

Two years.
The hell with the planet, maybe they won’t even get there. Two years in this metal can with a captain who has failed, an old man mocked at in his drunkenness? No one to hold us together, as Yellaston had done during those unbearable weeks when the oxygen ran low, when panic had hung over all their heads. He had been so good then, so right. Now he’s let Tim take it all away from him, he’s lost it. We aren’t together anymore, not after this. It’ll get worse.
Two years . . .

“In the . . . fan,” Yellaston whispers with tragic dignity, letting Aaron put him onto his bed. “In . . . the fan . . . my fault.”

“In the morning,” Aaron tells him gently, dreading the thought. “Maybe Ray can figure some way.”

“. . ..”

Aaron heads hopelessly for his bunk. He knows he won’t sleep.
Two years . . .

III

Silence . . . Bright clinical emptiness, no clouds, no weeping. Horizon, infinity. Somewhere words rise, speaking silence: I AM THE SPOUSE. Cancel sound. Aaron, invisible and microbe-sized, sees on the floor of infinity a very beautifully veined silver membrane which he now recognizes as an adolescent’s prepuce, the disjecta of his first operation. . . .

Almost awake now, in foetal position; something terrible ahead if he wakes up. He tries to burrow back into dream, but a hand is preventing him, jostling him back to consciousness.

He opens his eyes and sees Coby handing him a hot cup; a very bad sign.

“You know about Tim.” Aaron nods, sipping clumsily. “You haven’t heard about Don Purcell, though. I didn’t wake you. No medical aspects.”

“What about Don Purcell? What happened?”

“Brace yourself, boss.”

“For Christ’s sake, don’t piss around, Bill.”

“Well, about oh-three-hundred we had this hull tremor. Blipped all Tighe’s tapes. I called around, big flap, finally got the story. Seems Don fired his whole scouter off on automatic. It’s loaded with a complete set of tapes, records, everything he could get his hands on. The planet, see? They say it can punch a signal through to Earth when it gets up speed.”

“But Don, is Don in it?”

“Nobody’s in it. It’s set on autopilot. The
Beast
had some special goodies, too, our people must have a new ear up someplace. Mars, I heard.”

“Jesus Christ . . .” So fast, it’s happening, Aaron thinks. Where does Coby get his information, anything bad he knows it all. Then he sees the faint appeal under Coby’s grin; this is what he can do, his wretched offering.

“Thanks, Bill.” Aaron gets up effortfully. . . . First Tim and now Don—war games on
Centaur.
It’s all wrecked, all gone.

“Things are moving too fast for the old man.” Coby leans back familiarly on Aaron’s bunk. “Good thing, too. We have to get a more realistic political organization. This great leader stuff, he’s finished. Oh, we can keep him on as a figurehead. . . . Don and Tim are out too, for now anyway. First thing to start with, we elect a working committee.”

“You’re crazy, Bill. You can’t run a ship with a committee. We’ll kill ourselves if we start politics.”

“Want to bet?” Coby grins. “Going to see some changes, boss.”

Aaron sluices water over his head to shut off the voice. Elections, two years from nowhere? That’ll mean the Russian faction, the U.S. faction, the Third and Fourth Worlders; scientists versus humanists versus techs versus ecologists versus theists versus Smithites—all the factions of Earth in one fragile ship. What shape will we be in when we reach the planet, if we live that long? And any colony we start—Oh, damn Yellaston, damn me—

“General meeting at eleven hundred,” Coby is saying. “And by the way, Tighe really did go wandering for about twenty minutes last night. My fault, I admit it, I forgot the isolation seal was off. No harm done. I got him right back in.”

“Where was he?”

“Same place. By the port where
China
was.”

“Take him with you to the meeting,” Aaron says impulsively, punishing them all.

He goes out to get some breakfast, trying to shake out of the leaden feeling of oversleep, of doom impending. He dreads the meeting, dreads it. Poor old Yellaston trying futilely to cover his lapse, trying to save public face. A figurehead. He can’t take that, he’ll go into depression. Aaron makes himself set up Tighe’s tapes to occupy his thoughts.

Tighe’s tapes are worse than before, composite score down another five points, Aaron sees, even before the twenty-minute gap. His CNS functions are coming out of synch, too, an effect he hasn’t seen in an ambulant patient, especially one as coordinated as Tighe. Curious . . . Have to study it, Aaron thinks apathetically. All our curves are coming out of synch, we’re breaking up. Yellaston was our pacemaker. Can we make it without him? . . . Am I as dependent as Foy?

It is time for the meeting. He plods down to the Commons, sick with pity and dread; he is so reluctant to listen that he does not at first notice the miracle: there is nothing to pity. The Yellaston before his eyes is firm-voiced, erect, radiating leaderly charisma; is announcing, in fact, that
Centaur
’s official green code for the Alpha sun was beamed to Earth at oh-five-hundred this morning.

What?

“As some of you are aware,” Yellaston says pleasantly, “our two scout commanders have also taken independent initiative to the same effect in messaging their respective Terrestrial governments. I want to emphasize that their actions were pursuant to specific orders from their superiors prior to embarkation. We all regret, we, here who are joined in this mission have always regretted—that the United Nations of Earth who sponsored our mission were not more perfectly united when we left. We may hope they are so now. But this is a past matter of no concern to us, arising from tensions on a world none of us may ever visit again. I want to say now that both Tim Bron and Don Purcell”—Yellaston makes a just-perceptible fatherly nod toward the two commanders, who are sitting quite normally on his left, despite Tim’s taped eye—“faithfully carried out orders, however obsolete, just as I or any of us would have felt obligated to do in their places, had we been so burdened. Their duties have now been discharged. Their independent signals, if they arrive, will serve as confirmation to our official transmission to Earth as a whole.