Joe Haldeman SF Gateway Omnibus: Marsbound, Starbound, Earthbound (45 page)

“Moonboy?”

“Yeah. If you see him, would you pitch him out the air lock for me?”

“What happened?”

“We were just talking.” She dropped some tissues into the toilet, and I handed her fresh ones. “Well, we sort of fucked, I guess that’s obvious, and I was talking to him, reassuring him . . . and, I don’t know. I must have blinked. He was starting to sit up, and he whacked me a good one with his elbow. Said it was an accident, but no way. Had all his weight behind it.” She shuddered and rocked a couple of times. Another woman, I would have held, comforted. Elza wouldn’t like that.

“Glad my martial arts instructor isn’t here. She would slap the shit out of me.”

“Was it something you said?”

She looked up at me, ghastly but a little comical. “Yes. But I’m not sure what, exactly. I’ll talk with him after he’s . . . after we’ve both calmed down a little.”

“Maybe you should slap the shit out of
him
. I mean, just as therapy.”

She nodded. “Therapy for me, anyhow.”

Namir appeared in the doorway, galvanized. As if a silent lightning bolt had struck. “Blood,” he said. “What?”

“An accident,” Elza said, standing carefully. “Stupid accident. Get outa here and let us clean this mess up.”

“It’s broken,” he said. Dustin had come up behind him and was staring.

“No shit, it’s broken. But a doctor has already looked at it.”

“You were with—”

“An accident, Namir. Make yourself useful and get me some ice. And a drink, while you’re at it.” He backed away, and Dustin followed him.

I wet a handcloth with cold water and handed it to her. She dabbed and rubbed at the blood one-handed. The stream had pooled at her navel and gone on to mat her pubic hair. I gave her another cloth and rinsed the first one out.

“What are you going to tell them?”

She scrubbed her pubic hair unself-consciously. “They know I was with him. Namir, at least, knew I was going to raise some . . . delicate matters. For the time being, I’m going to stand behind doctor-patient confidentiality.” She threw the rag into the sink. “Help me get dressed?”

She pulled a brown shift out of a drawer and wriggled into it, switching arms to keep the wad of tissues in place. She went back into the bathroom and spit out a clot and retched.

“Ugh.” She sat heavily on an ottoman, elbows on her knees.

Meryl tapped on the doorjamb and stepped in. “Moonboy
hit
you? Elza?”

“Said it was an accident. Pretty well aimed.”

“I don’t understand. I can’t imagine a less violent man.”

“Wonder how often people say that. After ax murders and such.”

“Where is he now?” I asked.

“In bed.” They were set up with separate bedrooms currently and a small shared anteroom. “I haven’t talked to him. I was reading in the kitchen, and Namir came in.”

Elza peered up at her. “He’s never, um?”

“Never even raises his voice, no.”

“Well, he’s sitting on something. A powder keg.” She looked at the tissues and replaced them. “At least he didn’t break any teeth. ‘Dentist, heal thyself.’ ”

“I . . . I’m sorry,” Meryl said with an odd tone of voice, like “I’m kind of sorry my husband hit you while you were fucking, but not really.”

“Look,” Elza said, “it probably was an accident. Let’s leave it at that. I’ll talk to him after he’s rested.”

“I suppose accidents aren’t always accidents,” Meryl persisted. “Maybe it wasn’t you who was the actual target.”

“Maybe not.” She shook her head. “Probably not. But not you, either. Childhood thing.”

“He had a
happy
childhood. He adores his mother.”

“And his father died?”

“Left. But it was amicable, no-fault.”

“You might talk to him about that. Or no. Let me talk to him. It’s something we were . . . closing in on.”

Namir came in with a tall drink and a plastic bag of chipped ice. “Thanks. Carmen, do we have a clean washcloth left?”

“Sure.” I handed it to her and she wrapped it around the ice, dropping the bloody wad, and pressed the cold pack to her nose.

She sipped the cold drink, holding it at an awkward angle. “Thanks. Look. I don’t think he knows how badly he injured me. Let’s not make a big deal of it?”

Dustin shook his head. “No. He’s got to know he—”

“Trust me, no, darling. This is something I have to control, whether he knows it yet or not.”

“I could,” Namir began.

“No. You boys get back to your game. Please. Just be normal.”

Sure, a normal family full of Martians and spies, hurtling toward its doom a contracted quarter of a century away.

Paul stepped into the doorway, rubbing sleep from his eyes, and stared at the sight of all the blood. “What the fuck?”

“A reasonable question,” Elza said.

I lay in the dark holding a pack of tissues, listening to Elza’s ragged breathing as she went in and out of sleep. I passed her a tissue whenever a stoppage woke her. Then the pills would carry her back to sleep.

When people stopped falling out of the sky, the day of Gehenna, I took an embassy car and drove out to the suburb past Neve Tsedek, where my parents lived. Driving was difficult downtown, streets clotted with cars that had gone out of control as their drivers died. Some automatic cars were stalled, pushing against piles of metal and flesh. I tried not to drive over bodies, but it was impossible. I saw perhaps fifty people walking or standing in all of downtown Tel Aviv, sharing with me the inexplicable gift of life.

On the thruway there were long stretches of uninterrupted pavement, and then immense pileups, surrounded by empty undamaged cars. Of course people would stop, then open their doors and take one breath of unfiltered air.

My mother’s neighborhood looked unaffected, except for a few cars oddly parked in yards or in the middle of the street. There were no people about, but that could have been normal.

The front door was unlocked. I called for her, and, of course, there was no answer.

I found her in the kitchen, lying on her back in a tidal pool of blood. The door to the garden had been kicked down from the outside.

A nurse by training, combat nurse by politics, she had rushed to the knife rack and snatched a razor-sharp Toledo steel paring knife, a souvenir from Spain that she used daily and kept keen. A straw in her left hand, she had tried to give herself an emergency tracheotomy. Then nicked an artery, a carotid artery. Of course the tracheotomy wouldn’t have helped.

She wrote in blood on a white plastic cutting board CAN’T EXHALE, with a drying fingerprint apostrophe. She had always been careful about grammar.

Too much blood in this life.

2 September 2088

This was a very interesting day for observing humans. I didn’t witness the precipitating incident last night but have reconstructed it from several accounts, including Snowbird’s interpretation. She is closer to Carmen than I am, and Carmen saw much of it.

Apparently Elza and Moonboy were mating (or “fucking,” to be more accurate), an intimacy outside their traditional pairing and tripling but not forbidden. Something went seriously wrong, and Moonboy struck Elza with such force that he caused a serious injury to her face. Then he went back to his own area, leaving Elza alone and bleeding.

Carmen saw that she was in trouble and came to her aid. Elza is a doctor, but perhaps with only two hands had trouble treating herself.

I heard the noise when other humans became involved and watched from a distance I hoped was polite. It was fascinating.

Much of human action is, of course, predicated on passion, but for all the indirect evidence I have of this from reading and cube, I had never before seen one person injure another out of emotion. He hit her face with his elbow, which makes me think they must have finished mating. In all the postures they use for mating, there are some where the female might surprise the male that way, but not vice versa. The elbow is not as complex as our joints; it is more or less a bony hinge that connects the upper and lower parts of the arm.

Evidently Carmen helped her give “first aid” to herself. Her two husbands showed up, and Dustin, at least, wanted to “discuss” the matter with Moonboy, which implied a desire to inflict reciprocal injury, a natural human trait. Elza insisted that he not do that.

Meryl, Moonboy’s wife, showed up and argued that he had never done anything like this before, which Elza accepted, but said it didn’t help her nose. Pilot Paul, who had been asleep next door, joined them, and so everything was explained again. So now every human knew what was going on, or at least part of it.

Namir and Dustin had been playing pool, and they obeyed their wife when she asked them to resume. The rest dispersed, Carmen staying behind to comfort Elza.

That is when the second phase began. Namir and Dustin were playing their game and talking when Moonboy came out of his room, staggering from the effects of alcohol, and asked them, or commanded them, to quiet down.

This seemed unreasonable to Dustin, at least, and he attacked Moonboy with the stick they use to propel the pool balls around. Namir moved in quickly to intervene, perhaps to prevent his spouse from murdering the young man. He is larger than either and was able to separate the two men and disarm Dustin and throw him into the swimming pool, which was probably wise. I know how calming that is.

Moonboy had sustained a wound to the top of his head, from the pool stick, which was bleeding even worse than Elza’s nose. I saw this. Blood covered his face and much of the front of his shirt. He fainted, and Namir carried him to the infirmary.

A comical scene ensued, which I suppose would be the third act of the play, in human terms. Moonboy’s wound had to be sewn up with stitches. Namir started the process, cleaning the wound and removing hair from around it, but before he could start stitching, his wife came in and took over. So she sewed the wound closed while Carmen held the ice pack to her nose, both of them laughing over the absurdity of the situation. Along with Namir and Meryl, they carried the patient back to his bed.

Then the three women moved into the kitchen and drank alcohol and laughed for some time. The men either weren’t invited or felt they wouldn’t be welcome.

Altogether, a complex display of interactions, which I could not pretend to understand. It will be interesting to record the changes this causes in attitudes and actions.

It’s a pity that we will probably not live to return to Mars and discuss all this. The starship is like a small laboratory, with us nine organisms sealed within. But there’s no scientist to peer at us from outside, and draw conclusions.

Namir suggested a meeting the morning after, while Moonboy was still under sedation. It was natural for Elza to lead the discussion.

“For me, it could have been a lot worse.” She touched her bruised nose gently. Both eyes were dark, too. One nostril was open, the other packed with gauze. “The break is simple, not ‘displaced.’ So it will heal without surgery. What’s broken inside Moonboy is not so easy to heal.”

“What do you know about his . . . condition?” Paul asked.

“More than I can say, ethically. It does involve anger that’s been suppressed for years, though. Unfortunately, it’s associated with claustrophobia.”

“But this starship is huge,” Snowbird said, gesturing with all four arms.

“Snowbird,” Paul said, “you’ve always lived inside a big room, a cave. Moonboy grew up in Kansas, a large flat state. You could look around and see forty kilometers in any direction.”

“I don’t know that that’s a factor,” Elza said. “This was a very small space, involuntary confinement.

“Anyhow, as well as the sedative, I’ve given him a mild antipsychotic medication. For his protection and ours.”

“Good,” Dustin said.

“I should give you one as well, darling. You have not been a model of rational behavior.”

“He came after me.”

“You could have fought him off with a pillow, not a pool cue. Try to leave your balls on the table next time. So to speak.”

“Yes, Doctor.” Obviously a familiar response.

“So do we have to keep him doped up for the duration?” Paul said. “Do we have enough drugs for that?”

“I can synthesize things that simple. I could keep us all doped to the gills for the whole mission. Which has crossed my mind.”

“That would not be practical,” Fly- in-Amber said. “Would you be able to eat, and drink, and excrete?”

“All in the same place,” Namir said.

“I’ve been to parties like that,” Dustin said.

“They’re kidding,” Elza said to the Martian. “So am I. Meryl, he’s never lost control like this before?”

“Not since we’ve been married; not on Mars.” She hesitated. “He got in trouble when he was a kid. That involved fighting, I remember. At the time, I thought how unlike him that was. But I never asked him for any details.”

“I’ll see if he wants to talk about it.”

“To you?”

“To a doctor. He ever say anything to you guys? About being a wild kid?”

The men all shook their heads. “I don’t remember him ever talking about his life on Earth,” Paul said. “Funny, now that I think of it. Everybody has Earth stories.”

“He’s odd that way,” Meryl said. “He talks about his mother, when he was little, and he talks about college, but not much in between.”

“That’s not so unusual,” I said. “Paul never talks about that time in his life. Do you?”

“Boring,” he said. “Dealing drugs, child prostitution, day in and day out.”

“Child prostitution?” Fly-in-Amber said.

“Kidding,” he said. “They were all over eighteen.”

“Paul . . .”

“I’m sorry, Fly-in-Amber. It’s disrespectful of me to kid you.”

“On the contrary,” the Martian said. “I learn from your humor. If you had actually been a bad boy, you wouldn’t joke about it. Your feelings are ambiguous, are they not? You wish you had been more bad?”

“Got me there,” he said. “Elza, you’re both victim and professional observer. What if it had happened to someone else—”