Mysteries of Motion (71 page)

Now he, too, is gone.

The Hygiene Unit is itself again. Curtainless, without a porthole to the crammed stars; it’s once again part of a mechanism skimming these bright wastes. The rocket probe with phallic nose has long since been dropped behind. A universe’s curve may or may not be construed as uterine. But they are in the belly of the
Courier,
as Soraya’s fetus is in hers; there’s nothing further of the erotic here. To look for it would be—unproductive. Would mean that we are dragging our old home with us toward an absolute, in whose focus no dream can apply. No voyage other than that of the measurer, measuring.

“Lost.” Soraya’s dove-voice cracks on it.

“Him? Mole? No, he’s just—”

“We all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Wert thinks it.”

“Did he say?”

“Not with the tongue.” Soraya’s trying to hide her grimace. She bends toward her belly, an arm sliding forward alongside, on the rim of the Jacuzzi. She wants the impossible, to lay her face on where the child is. “I mind for him.”

Veronica runs round the side of the tub to kneel in front of her. “Soraya. Look up. Don’t worry; they’ll find us. Mission Control. The computers will.
You
know that.” It doesn’t hit her as strange that she should be reassuring a person trained to them. Confidence flows where it can. “Come on, duck.” She lays her long palm on the belly, almost covering it. “The universe is too small, nuh, for him to be lost.” She’s talking like Vivie did to her when, waking in the dark hole of the midnight cot, the coifed head appeared over her, its earrings shaking, medicine rattles against all giants. Come, duck, what you need’s some hot milk.

“Soraya, honey.” She smooths the outstretched arms, so much shorter than her own. “Tell me again, nuh? How that baby going to be born, that lab we’re taking him to. Like how they going to manage it? How you?”

Soraya half raises up. Not that the two of them aren’t grown women severe on the ways of the world, but now they tap a complicity risen up in them. “Come on, hon duck. You compute it for me. Compute, poot. You know what a pootie is, that li’l sound a baby makes in his didie?” Gibberish such as the island women talked, severe women, too, in other circumstances—which popped out of Vivie to disprove her daytime counsel; No woman a baby-style woman just from she born to it.

“Raise up, Soraya.”

Where’s that stern voice coming from? Veronica stands as if she, too, doesn’t know, her neck stiff and high. Soraya raises up as if she’s already on that birth table.

“It will be like—I am to be in restraint. Those straps. Like in any hospital. But inside them—I will float. I will push, but not against. Nothing will drag at me. It will be all my push. And he will push, too, but so light—” Her arms lift, undulating. “Even they say the
pain
will float. They care for the research, not for me. But the doctors say I myself have not much push; some of the muscles are cut. And the abdominals, too.” The words issue odd and strict from between those dancing arms. “The pain, psssh—those men with their pencils. But this way the baby they say will cry only for the air. When he cries.” Her face is all delight. Then she sighs. “I will tell you something. I am three years older than I say.” She gives a little shrug. “Only the other Soraya knows. And Fateh.” She rolls her eyes. “No mens.”

Veronica scratches her head, her finger delicate down its center. “I’ll tell
you.
I’m two and a half years younger. Than my supposed legal. I wasn’t ten when I started menstruating, and just about to start a fancy school. My stepmother was ashamed for me, especially with the whites. We were in Ottawa by then. She said those wishy-washy English didn’t start till they were fourteen. And I was grades ahead in my classwork anyway—so she just switched me. Daddy never knew.”

They face each other, shoulders hunched. The giggles come by fits and starts, then louder and louder, one spell after another until they’re exhausted, when Soraya gives a shout. “And then—they will catch him. The boy. Maybe for a minute he will float, too, out, out, but quick they will catch him, in a net. Like a mosquito.”

“Little mens.” Veronica whispers it.

Turning as one, they check the screen. Empty. Then a boot comes on, in close-up. Another boot joins it. They hang there, their stubby bulldog fronts forward. Impossible to say whether they’re a pair or belong to space-walkers halted side by side. Both women hug their breasts, feeling their nudity. Then the boots are snatched up and away.

“Must be no small repair.” Veronica cocks her head. “Hey, listen.” A siren. Once. Twice. And again. “Is that the all-clear?”

“Or the emergency?”

Can you believe it? They’ve both forgotten which is which. “Told us so many times, too,” Veronica says between her teeth. “Beginning with that motel.”

The humdrum word hits like a pebble slung at a barred window. They’re silent.

“This laughing we make together—” Soraya says. “The name for it?”

“Giggling.”

“You think—we do it too much?”

“No,” Veronica says. “All considered.”

When the screen springs to radiant life the shiny walls dapple with it.

ON COURSE

The video wouldn’t lie. It’s not used to it. Or not in such short syllables.

All clear, Soraya whispers to her belly.
La la. Yo-yo.
You and I know it has to be. All clear for you and me. There—didn’t he move? Or is it the digestion only? When it happens you won’t have to ask, Frank the medic said—he’ll give a kick that’ll send you to kingdom come.

She sees that Veronica, halfway across the Hygiene Unit, is no longer squatting in her usual style—head lax between her piston knees, or lying full length along the pool’s rim. She’s standing up, her eyes like one of the pair of onyx statuettes originally plundered from the site of the Great Oasis at Gharga, which Bakh had hidden in his walled Teheran garden. The museum, Bakh had chortled, was begging the pair back on a promise to return them ceremonially to Khartoum, where until
A.D.
400 or so, they had stood in a temple marking the confluence of the Blue Nile and the White. Which promise neither party had expected to be kept.

Both women are dreaming.

“Veronica—what are you looking at.”

“I’m watching birds.”

“Birds? Here—you are watching birds?” But they are both tolerant.

“Three of them. Maybe four. All dancing.”

“There’s a bird in my belly. Come feel.” She’s not a video; she’s lying. She wants her fetus constantly monitored during its long dream to become a child. Shifting head and arm to massage her nape, she is transfixed. “Look! Look what you are
doing.”

Veronica looks down at herself. All this time her right hand has been holding the open tube of cocoa butter. Her left hand, more knowing, and somewhere along the path of reflection holding out its palm, is now circling one of her nipples then the other one, round and round, creaming them.

Wert, come to the corridor side of the unit to reassure his wife, smiles to himself. The door here reminds him of the smart but jerry-built door of their apartment at home, a nasty modern flat and more than he can afford, but the layout convenient for a double establishment. Through such doors the lowest conversation carries. The bathhouse cackle reassures him now as always, giving him a double dose late in life of what he’d learned so tardily to respect—that life’s smaller details are often its holiest. At home, too, the voices often change timbres, the wife now in Switzerland softening hers to a dove’s. The Soraya here, since her fertility, has now and then taken to a cawing which amuses and heartens him. He lingers to hear it before he knocks. The
Courier
at times reminds him of his entire apartment house.

Look, what you are doing!

Veronica, with her crow’s croak, can usually be heard keeping her end up. Today she answers so softly the words are inaudible.

He’s always tried to keep up with what he thinks of as the particulars. His whole career has been formally drummed by those small gestures, less than deed but more than manners, and local to no country. No need to be nostalgic about them. The little details called human, which merely means they take place well short of the emotions, are the likeliest to go on happening. Catastrophe doesn’t dislodge them. Sometimes they’re part of the horror; sometimes they appear to assuage it. NASA has no manual concerning them.

He has in his hand a blunt plastic container not intended for aerated stuff but adaptable. Tuohy stores his “pop” in them. By further adaptation one may drink from them. They are for vomit. Carrying an empty, he has broken into certain stores in the Payload Bay and made a sweating, dangerous and illegal transfer of federal property.

In that country farthest behind him, his childhood, those who were confronting death, or often only life, were often persuaded to partake of a little liquid refreshment beforehand. Women awaiting their time were especially urged to it. He is bringing his wife a beer.

Veronica studies her breasts. They’re small cone shapes with large nipples, puffed now, which purse at her like the sly lips of neighbors. So that’s it, huh—she’s tired of the ethical life. As led alongside of friend Tom. While saving their lives for their memoirs.

But who’ll she choose? All—and/or none?

She reaches over to pat Hossein Bakhtiary Wert to be, child of many mothers, still in his seed-pouch turn. Soraya herself seems asleep, her mouth wide though not gullible. According to her, they are brought up to begin anointing their bellies and sides the minute they’ve slept with a man—pardon,
the
man. The nipples can wait until conception.

All right, then. She gives each of her own nipples a tap for its trouble and begins buttering her belly. By rights she should have begun at fourteen. Her child will have many fathers.

Soraya’s not asleep. Her eyelids are quivering.

“Go on, look,” Veronica says. “The past makes all of us whores.”

P
ASSENGERS KNOW A LOT
already, but never trust their own expertise. Even any old mother who’s never flown has had a pursuit in heart from the beginning, or a flight. Even Wert’s son has already begun his brilliantly designed impulsion toward the light. Wert, a tense sleeper, inches vainly in his restraint bag, worn during the shift that is night. One can’t toss in it. But if he lies yoga-still he can woo to him the arch of the Foget couch. Semi-awake, he rides the balance line between the expertise floating him on, and his own. Ahead of him, Seats One to Four—Mulenberg, Oliphant, Cohen-Lievering, Gilpin and, behind him, Soraya, do the same. He wakes.

In the other civilian cabins of the
Courier,
what are they doing? How little they’ve merged with this cabin’s consciousness. No wonder Soraya doubts the existence of those other small, six-sided worlds. If that they are. He sits up, yearning for tea.

ON COURSE

Each hour of that colophon, once so reassuring, is more impatiently unacceptable. The end of a journey as it nears always downgrades the journey itself. But that won’t account for why their long-promised intramural viewing of the spacecraft has been shunted into the scant prayer time before breakfast, or why their whole schedule has been telescoped. Two civilian administrators-to-be here, and neither of them told what-all—a divide and conquer habit of government which his old boss Nosworthy, a one-time Rhodes scholar, used to call
bye-fellowing
—a bye-fellow being one belonging to the college but not a member of its foundation. Wert’s been arguing in his head with Nosworthy for several days, asleep and awake. After a lifetime of reports to that silent interlocutor he still hopes that the actual Nosworthy, long vanished into retirement, is alive somewhere. Arguing with the dead is unprofitable.

Wert pulls a nozzle from his armrest and drinks. In his and Soraya’s documents box is the brigadier general’s collapsible traveling cup he’d sent to Madame in Switzerland, found in her effects after her decease. Soraya, intent on her son’s American heritage, had insisted on bringing it. He stares at the nozzle, as it retracts. Unlike most objects he’s been used to, it doesn’t stare back. It has no historical past, to help make it real. An air of exaggeration always attaches to the real—only look close enough at people with noses, gas stations and foreshortened dogs. The norm is seldom very natural.

On the
Courier
the case is the opposite. Such an exaggeration lies at the core of the life possible here that every execution of it has had to be routine. Surfaces repeat themselves so steadily that it becomes useless to observe them as distinct. Even people are lessened. The pull of space is the main feature of every face. On his arrival at the living-station, his first trip out, he’d been disturbed to see that same muzzle on all faces waiting at the dock. He’d assumed that the larger rotor movement inside of which they lived would have relaxed them. Instead, each face is prognathous with intent, as with those aborigines for whom each moment is a gamble with the gods.

Indeed, Nosworthy, you’d have recognized us—as well as an old process. As Wert toured a wheel station twice as far from the sun as the Earth, yet made of ferronickel or asteroid, and currented by thermal prime movers, with refrigeration rooms for ice and oxygen cannily deep in the shadows of the rear walls, while other competences beyond his ken swarmed toward him in the Aztec light, he still thought: colonial?

Recalling certain specifications from his days with Ordoobadi’s company, he’d primed himself to watch for bombs hung on what had been called “Ross-Smith arms,” or rather to ask for them, since as defense ordnance they might be on the outer surface only. “Ross-Smith?” the commander leading him around said. “Not for years.” Remembering that bland face, Wert understands the quality Dove and his crew have been picked for. The best colonials were like the sturdiest equipment, not rare but satisfactorily routine. That’s why he, Wert, won’t do.

Indeed, Uncle, they’ve done their best here to remove all drama from us, so that, as deliverably tailored packets of consciousness we may better enter and exit what NASA calls the “man-machine relationship in space.” Any irruption, if it comes, will be that much more exaggerated. When it comes. Life having no obligation to teach us anything useful about life. Not in time to use it, like say—an old cup.