Mysteries of Motion (62 page)

“Whose? Whose enemy aren’t we—you and I—important enough to be? You’ve been out there. Tell us.”

The warning light over the door is pulsing red. A person is about to enter. Gilpin hopes for Mole—his happy-nihilism-to-you grin. He sees Soraya arch her neck like a cat’s, lift her nose, hunch her shoulders. She does know. She knows who it will be.

Veronica breezes in, the airlock seeming to deposit her astride a wind. But by now the movement is characteristic of all of them when moving in and out of gravity, a kind of brimming. In Mulenberg’s heart a valve opens. The essence of to and fro—we’ll have it always with us. We’ll have her. He sees she’s counting heads. “No, stay,” he says. “Tom and I are just leaving.”

“Yes, Jack and I.”

Her eyebrows go up at both of them. In the fatigue suit, with her long bones boxed away, she’s lost her model’s leanness. Though she never wore makeup except at the eyes, she now looks as women do when washed pure of it—caught by age and youth at the same time. “Hey—what’s that pile on the floor?”

“That’s my delusion. Tom, want to tell her it?”

“Nobody here seems to want to tell his own.”

“He thinks all those folders are blank,” Mulenberg said.

“Yes, I think they’re all blank.”

“What are you two—?” She kneels, passing her hands over the white pages. She looks to Wert, away from the two men staring at her in concert, as if whatever she says might bind her to one of them. “They are blank, aren’t they?”

Wert nods. Holding his woman tighter.

“Mulenberg’s collecting delusions. How about you, Wert? Don’t you have any?”

“Sure. Mine is—that I left mine all at home. And yours, Gilpin?”

“That he never had any,” Mulenberg says, almost with affection.

“He’s read me.” And who says you don’t have humor, Jack?

Soraya, tracking all this back and forth says softly to Wert: “Yes—they talk like the prison.”

In truth, a jailhouse gaiety is rising here.

Or is it lack of air?

All four of them are standing closer, as in a street corner shell game. Veronica joins the circle. But in its center nobody’s playing. The game’s not here. Yet she seems to feel there is one.

“A penny for your thoughts.” The porthole light aureoles Mulenberg’s head. It’s not clear which woman he’s speaking to.

“No, Soraya. Come away.” Wert edges her toward the hatch.

Mulenberg bars them. “Soraya. Say there’s a hair across this door. Is there anyone outside it?…No?…Not Lievering? Not Mole?”

“N-not at the moment.” Her accent turns Englishy, stiff, a schoolgirl’s.

“Who might there be? Besides us?”

“No one.” Her eyes are sleepwalker wide.

Veronica interrupts. “So she’s told you that story, Mulenberg?”

“Not all of it.”

“She won’t. Bad for the baby.”

Wert coughs. “That’s my wife’s delusion. That the womb protects the child.” His restless hand seeks hers again. She’s his worry-bead.

Veronica lays a tender hand on her. “Shall I tell them?”

Between the two women Mulenberg senses that sudden waxy flow which can join the most ill-assorted of them. Just so, Veronica stood over the blood-spattered black-gartered, foolish haunch of pimp’s meat, the night of his and Ventura’s exploit—only with a gilt dress on her arm, offering it.

Soraya gives her the nod.

“She thinks—that we in Cabin Six are the only passengers aboard the
Courier.”

Someone’s signaling to enter the hatch. No head turns.

To Mulenberg, the other four in the center of the Free Room look like a war monument, each figure stricken in its own attitude—with him the one off-side.

Wert’s fingers, so restless by themselves, are locked firm across his wife’s belly. No bulge there, but anyone would know what he guards. Veronica, the tallest, pivots slowly, half-left, half-right, a weather vane at the top.

“Listen—” Gilpin says, “hear it?” The silence has changed. Where in a jet plane the noise assures a sense of flight, here until now it has seemed rather the stars that moved, the sun, while they themselves hung fixed, dead-center of the universal change, their vessel a great loosed shark, plundering the same space waves over and over, often as if ahead of its passengers. Who haven’t moved an inch since Canaveral.

This is what it means to be in orbit. The universe pulls past you.

But now—with that same slight dislocation which occurs between the moving train and the train at standstill in the station, they’re pulling past the universe.

“We’re moving—” Gilpin says. “Aren’t we?” Because that’s what we’re here for. He’s the man who always has to do what he’s here for.

The others nod, abstracted.

“I felt it, didn’t I?” Wert says. “The child, turning?”

“Too soon, too soon.” But her eyes are shining ahead.

Veronica’s stopped pivoting. “Does it strike you—all day I’ve been thinking so. We’re shifting course.”

They’re letting go. Of time.

The video is blinking     
RETURN TO CABIN        RETURN TO CABIN        RETURN TO CABIN

When Lievering enters—moving like the king of the tightrope walkers, for one can’t burst through an airlock—his first thought is that he has at last joined the gas chamber of his longings.

They’re all so still and clumped, in a sharper ozone than he’s ever smelled here. The great hubcap of the sun is at the porthole. In its white vision they press together, their arms hung down and wavering. Death is not yet their dignity. They’re mayflies, the wings of their past lives folded glossy, ephemera collected around the glass cage of space. Inside which is the gold icon-shoe of traveling.

In the minute it takes to count heads they’re Cabin Six again, already filing past him. They must have forgot to count—that precaution which should by now be routine. His entrance has reminded them. They’ve surely dared too many for the Free Room’s air, by the half-drugged way they pass by him, their eyes ark-dazed and liquid, like people just out of the theater.

He’s counted. “Where’s Mole?” And to the next one in line—“Where’s Mole?” And to the next one, the echo following them. He trails after them.

Mulenberg’s alone again with his two communicants, his daughters. The model of the
Courier
is warm against his hip. Over in that corner is the tumbled pile of folders—what the cook at the ranch, a believer in spiritualism, would call “the evidential.” He’d never believed the cook’s clairvoyant writings, brought to the kitchen table from a half-dozen assorted famous dead—and all in the same round penmanship. Or the tales of horses that spooked under a dead man’s saddle, or mossy fingers brushing your face in the dark like your dead sister used to tease you with, and when there was no live-oak within two thousand miles. Or a prediction that broke someone’s back last Saturday, within only three and a half weeks—and two rodeos—of the specified time. He hadn’t believed any of it but he remembers. He’s alone.

His flesh creeps—and he knows it for spiritual delight. I know where I am, and will from now on. In a minute I’ll go forward to the flight deck and tell them anything they want to hear. That, yes, I’ll stay up there, for the two-year contract—or who knows, forever? Though there’s no more forever in space than there is anywhere and no competency they offer him can compare with his own. No evidential.

Oh my honies, I’m still the passenger. But I know where I am. I’m on EVA, in extra-vehicular activity. Let me describe my machine.

He’s on the vehicle of himself. Where all the delusions may prove real.

“F
EAR OF HEIGHTS
can be a fear of rising.” Lievering stretches in his hammock in the Sick Bay, next to Mole’s. “A metaphysical fear—in a foolish way.”

The crewman who subs as aeronurse and medical aide has gone off for his mid-shift meal. During the hour Lievering subs for him he’s dubbed Mole his assistant here—the sub’s sub’s sub, Mole said, accepting. He loves any category which will keep him a kind of student. Lievering, whom the flight deck has tabbed for several such fill-in tasks which might require his refined agility in case of emergency, has in his spare time been coaching Mole in the special pratfalls of non-gravity living. But here they rest, and exchange legends. It’s Lievering’s talent to be able to make a man of eighteen feel he has one.

“What the f—is—what’s metaphysical?” With Lievering one doesn’t swear. Too time-consuming. Mole has long since been escorted through the etymology of “fuck.”

“The science of being. Of all your being that is not physical. Or is behind it.”

“Oh yeah,
meta.”
Mole has had Freshman Greek under The Chape, but is ashamed of it. He purses his nose in what he hopes is a high-powered sneer. Facial expressions go awry here. “What happened to plain old fear of falling?”

“That’s for when you do fall. Most of the time you don’t—which is when the other takes over.” He believes that his attacks, which he feels no need of here, are a kind of falling and rising both.

“Tell me again about the camp.” Mole has learned that his new friend half-wants to be drawn back.

“You know I was only a year old when we left. Germany.” This is the nearest he comes to revealing that his parents had never been in a camp.

“Uh-huh. Tell me anyway.” Mole habitually imagines himself as an ongoing cartoon. Any action of his that he doesn’t want to examine goes quick-quick into the daily strip—the cartoon of Mole. He has reels of it. It’s a way of getting through. Lievering’s word obsessions, which stop all action like a sentry’s “Halt!”, or his word pictures of what he couldn’t have seen are just Lievering’s cartoon. Mole smiles, gently swinging. Dormitory convention, summer-sailor dusks at gnat-time, sleepy-time in shuttle-land; it’s all the same. Men in adjacent hammocks swap.

“Well, then. You remember what an energumen is? Sometimes spelled with an added
e.
Energumene.”

“A devil-possessed, yes,” Mole quotes as taught.
“‘If ever there was an energumene, the devil is speaking with that woman’s
tongue’—Sir Walter Scott. Was it always just the women in the camp went like that?”

“No. But it’s them, certain of them that I think of, that come to me.” Certain little Jewish women, often very pretty when young, who when they age—the short grapple-hook nose, the swarthy skin, the hooded eyes—look like small, winning owls. Competent, with the smell of many milk puddings behind them. Or those like retired elementary-school teachers, their breasts molded into one gray bird-bodice spread with a few gold chains, their feet leather orthopedic stubs. “Tenacious women, who don’t serve the devil easy, or go under with just a quack. So they become—” Lievering can still shudder at his old nightmares. “Black-tongued, from more than thirst. Harridans, but because of hunger.” He pronounces it with the
g
soft, to rhyme with “lunger,” then corrects himself. “Hunger. The eyes get a snot-glare. Like green glass.”

Mole shivers pleasurably. “And the men?”

“I don’t like to—remember.”

“Yes you do. Come on.”

“They become—mirrors. Torture-mirrors. Double ones. From the back they reflect the torturer. From the front—you. Or sometimes they are walking lopsided, with purple tongues. Or with the skin in tatters. They have been hanged, or boiled, but won’t die. For which they apologize.”

“Br-r-r.”

“Don’t make a game.”

“Come on. You do.”

“You—devil.” But Lievering is pleased. No one’s ever said that, even the doctors. Mole’s truths go as deep—or are as gauche—as his own.

“Wolf, Vulf. Jay-queeze, Jacques—” Mole teases. When a man tutors your legs and arms, sending you on practice swoops down corridors, prying you off walls and showing you how to arch the small of the back to control the ballooning and haul in, even coaching you on how to drink in non-G without either dribbling or making yourself into a blooming fountain of Versailles—then, if you don’t want to become his baby you become his junior intimate. “Cohen-Lievering. The only guy outside the flight deck to carry a gun.”

“I’ve told you. It’s just a—document. And I don’t carry it.”

“Got a bore, hasn’t it. Got ammunition.”

“Such ammunition. Like hundred-year-old bird droppings. I see when they dig it up.”

Mole gets up on an elbow, steadying the hammock, which makes him motion-sick, a fact he conceals. “For your info—they polished it. Everything…to a sweet shine. Those boys are something.”

Lievering rocks with his hammock. “Yes, they were.”

“What you mean—were? They in the past or something?”

Lievering elbows up. For some reason this is harder today than it has been, as if there’s resistance somewhere. “You looked at our private documents?”

“Gun’s a breechloader. Never seen one. First I thought they got it assembled wrong. Uh-uh. Not those boys.” Under Lievering’s stare he says loftily, “That hope chest in the cabin? Somebody has to. Study it.” That pose won’t hold. “Gilpin peeks. Saw him.” He shakes his head, though tenderly. “Wouldn’t you know. Couple of peewee books.”

“Those are his own.”

“’kay. Sorry.”

“Seen anything else of mine?”

“You mean that gre’ beeg hankie with the gre’ beeg
Elise a Jacques
on it?” He bats his eyes vigorously. “No.”

“Oh—Mole.”

Mole subsides happily, that being an inflection he’s used to. His bad character is maintained—in his own eyes, where it’s most needed. As to his identity, he knows that this man of two names and episodic life has never questioned it. A Wolf-Jacques looks beyond such matters, into the
meta
behind a person. Though when Mole thinks of Tom Gilpin and Lievering together—the two men he likes best in the world or even loves, their innocence frightens him. Of course, to Fred and himself, older people had always seemed innocent to a degree, or else they couldn’t have accepted life as they had. But back there, on a known planet, the collective incompetence hadn’t been so frightening. There’d been a kind of trust that the veteran planet itself, heavy with the secrets of the millennia, would somehow advise.

He knows only one older person he’d rate as not innocent.

“How do you know so much about guns, Mole?”