The Golden Space (13 page)

“Will you go live with Chane, Josepha?”

“Yes, at least for a while. He wants me to travel with him, meet some of his friends. He feels he has to continue speaking for you. He’s probably right.”

“He is right. Our plans may not work out. Some call us infiltrators—as if we’re subversive.” Teno sniffed loudly. “It’s good that you’ll be with Chane. Without Ramli and me to worry about all the time, you’ll be able to work things out between you.”

Josepha stopped and turned to her child, gazing into Nicholas Krol’s gray eyes. “Teno,” she said hesitantly, “there’s one thing I have to ask. It may seem strange or silly to you, but humor me for a bit.” She paused. “I don’t know how to put it exactly. Do you have any feelings for me at all, as a parent? Do you really, deep down, feel any sort of an attachment, any concern? I just want to know.”

The gray, quiet eyes watched her calmly. “It would be strange,” the child answered, “if we could have lived among you without coming to some understanding of your feelings. Of course I’m concerned. I care about you and I’d feel a loss if I no longer saw you or couldn’t speak to you. If one loses a friend or companion, one loses another perspective, another viewpoint, a different set of ideas and the personality that has formed them.”

“That isn’t quite what I meant.” Josepha struggled with the words. “Do you feel any love?” She waited, wondering what Teno thought.

Teno was silent for a few moments. Josepha thought: I shouldn’t have asked. A person could profess love, but actions were what counted. Teno and the others had tried to show all the love they were capable of feeling, if they could feel it at all. One could not ask, should not ask.

“Do you believe,” Teno said softly, “that only your physiology, your glands, your hormones can produce love? It isn’t true. Love is part of a relationship—it can’t be reduced to physical characteristics or body chemistry. I love you, Josepha. I’ll care about you as long as I know you or remember you.”

She should not have asked. The words could tell her nothing. She could still doubt, still wonder if the child was telling her what would be most comforting.

But Teno’s face was changing. As she watched, she saw the child’s lips form a crescent, and realized with a shock that Teno was smiling. It was a slow smile, a gentle smile, compassionate but impenetrable. A softness seemed to flicker behind the gray eyes. It was Teno’s parting gift.

The smile, too, might be a comforting mask. But as she entered the house with her child, Josepha decided she would accept it.

Unguided Days

I

Earth was a faraway pearl in the blackness.

It grew into a mottled marble as the ship drew nearer. Pinpoints of light glittered on the nightside. The globe waned into a silver crescent, offering a setting for the jewel of the rising sun.

The seat held her. She tensed, eyes closed, waiting for the gravitic shield to shut down.

Her legs jerked, and Nola opened her eyes. She was in a floater; the gravitic generator, a small golden square resting on the floor, shimmered. Nola lifted her head, gazing through the transparent shields of the floater at the empty room’s pale yellow walls. She saw the green outside the window on her left, and remembered.

The dream had faded. She signaled to her implant, and the generator shut down; Earth’s gravity bound her again. The slender silvery wires that held her body began to stimulate her muscles and nerves. The shield slid open. Arms at her sides, she crossed the room with tiny steps, catching a glimpse of her hand as she opened the door. Her hand was a pale claw; the silver threads on it glistened.

Nola left the room and passed through the hall. Her long pants were weights pulling at her hips; her blouse seemed to bind her, pulling at her shoulders. As she descended the spiral staircase, she smelled onions and garlic and heard someone singing. The song was a wail. Yasmin, her hostess, was cooking.

The first floor of Yasmin’s house was a large room with sofas and chairs in one corner, a table and chairs in another. The rest of the room was cluttered with piles of books, tapestries, manuscripts, vases of flowers, and a few dust balls. The dust made her nose twitch. She threaded her way carefully among piles of books and stood by a window, studying the settlement. It seemed primitive and dull. One man in a nearby house tended a garden; a man and a woman strolled by along the road.

In the late afternoon light, the grass outside was a deeper green; the hills in the distance were blue. She squinted at the unfamiliar, disorienting landscape and thought of Luna’s long afternoon, the black shadows and tall pale mountains.

Nola turned away from the window and walked toward the kitchen, which was separated from the large room by a partition. She peered in at Yasmin. The short, dark-haired woman stood before a butcher’s block, chopping onions.

“May I help?” Nola asked.

“Oh, no, I like to cook. It relaxes me.” Yasmin reached toward the dispenser, pulled some carrots from it, and went back to chopping, wielding her blade forcefully. Yasmin wore no Bond; she had said that no one in the settlement did. Nola, eyes stinging from the onions, looked away from Yasmin’s chubby Bondless wrist.

“I’m sorry,” Yasmin said suddenly. Her cleaver clattered against the block. “You came here to see Mischa.” Before Nola could protest, the other woman had taken her arm gently and drawn her back through the large room to the front door. The door opened. “See that house over there?” Yasmin pointed. “That one, the one that looks like a yurt. That’s his house. He’s probably there now. Go ahead, I won’t have anything ready for a while.”

Nola hesitated, then walked outside. The scent of Yasmin’s lilac trees was thick; Earth was a place of strong odors. She had followed Mikhail Vilny to this lush, disturbing place, and she was no longer sure that she wanted to see him. She turned her head. The village was surrounded by a low stone wall; its rusty iron gate was unlocked, as if the people here had nothing to fear. A turret of stone stood near the center of the settlement.

Nola lingered at the edge of the dirt road, then began to walk toward Mikhail’s house. It stood away from the curving road, about one hundred meters from Yasmin’s home. Its curved sides were made of wood; the thatched roof perched on the house like a pointed hat. A path through the weedy lawn led past a rose garden to the door. She gazed at the budding bushes and remembered the roses he had grown on Luna, white and fat, with stems almost as tall as trees, blooms open to the artificial light. There had been no thorns in those rosebushes. She reached out for a pink bud, then withdrew her hand.

She climbed the two front steps, knocked, and waited. The door opened and she saw him.

Mikhail was the same. His reddish-brown hair was longer, his face a little rounder. His blue eyes stared straight at her; he was one of the few men from Earth whom she knew who was as tall as she.

“Nola.” He smiled when he said it. He was happy to see her. Her relief made her unable to speak for a moment.

“Mikhail.” She did not know what else to say. She kept her hands behind her back, pressed against the bottom of her spine.

“Did you come here just to see me?”

“Yes. You don’t think—” She paused, and looked down at her
feet. “I went to see your friend Lise Trang first. She told me you were here. I asked her to come
with me, but she wouldn’t.”

“She was angry. People tell a lot of lies.”

Nola looked up. “She was also frightened. She never leaves her house. She wouldn’t let me stay there. She had a creature watching me while I was with her, an android that looked like an elf. She called it a kobold.”

Mikhail’s smile faded. “I’ve seen them. Implants tell them what to do. They’re one of the new toys the biologists are making for us. You won’t find them here.”

“Lise told me this was a death cult.” Nola spoke rapidly. “She said a man named Giancarlo Lawrence was the leader. She must be mistaken: You can’t have joined such a thing.”

Mikhail stepped back. “Please come in.”

Nola entered the house, looking around nervously at the large, darkened room. It was bare except for mats thrown on the floor, as if Mikhail were a nomad camping here. She settled herself on a mat while Mikhail pressed a button on the wall. The curtains opened; sunlight brightened the room. A bed near the wall hung from the ceiling, attached by ropes. Near it, surrounded by flat stones, a pool shimmered. Mikhail settled on a mat near her. He looked as though he was at peace; she had not expected that.

“Did you come here just to see me?” he asked again. “Or were you coming here anyway?”

“To see you, of course.”

“Perhaps that’s what you tell yourself. You once thought your life seemed empty.”

She shook her head. “That was a bad moment, a mood. Maybe your earthly ideas contaminated me.” She tried to smile.

“Are you still angry with me, Nola?”

“No.” She gazed into his eyes as she spoke. “I wanted to tell you face-to-face that I wasn’t.”

“I couldn’t have stayed. Luna isn’t for me; this is my home. I kept thinking of how hard it would be to return if I stayed away too long.”

“I understand.” The wire web supporting her body reminded her of his argument. “And I can’t stay here. It isn’t just the gravity, it’s everything else.”

“You didn’t come here just to see me.”

“But I did.”

“I don’t think so. You didn’t have to come to Earth for that. You’re looking for something else.”

“But I’m not.”

“I think you are.”

If she listened long enough, she would believe him. “Lise said this was a death cult.”

Mikhail chuckled. “She doesn’t understand. There’s no death here, only life. We have no weapons, not even many tranquilizing rods. You saw the gate—it’s not even locked, and the wall is just a boundary, not a barrier. We don’t seek death, but we don’t fear it either.”

Nola watched his face. This settlement, she thought, was only another of those groups so common here now. There were many of these cults, and not all were dangerous; most were simply foolish, at least to her way of thinking. People here seemed unable to take the world as it was. They sought to construct edifices of ideas, as if that would somehow yield a truth, and, in so doing, they lost what was already present in the world. They could look at a storm and impart some meaning to it, a purpose. Nola, riding above Earth, would see only a pattern of clouds, the product of meeting masses of air, a calm and steady eye at the center of whirling wisps.

Then why was it that Mikhail, with his new ideas, smiled, and she, with her empiricism, frowned and knew despair? When it was time to sleep, she slept, and quickly, because she knew that if she lay awake, the terrors would come, the feelings of pointlessness about a series of endless, meaningless actions, the growing conviction that life was indeed too short and that she would die after all. Mikhail was her excuse; something else had brought her here.

She tried to shake the feeling. She had come to see Mikhail. He was all right. She had nothing else to do and might as well stay here for a while.

“Are you going to stay?” he asked, echoing her thoughts.

“For a while. I was told I needed a rest. It’s difficult to argue the matter with an antagonist attached to your brain.” She gestured at her forehead, at the implant under her scalp. “Yasmin Hallal met me at the gate when I arrived. She told me I could stay with her. She has a floater in one bedroom, so I should be comfortable.”

She waited for Mikhail to invite her to stay with him, but he did not. As he rose to show her to the door, she knew at last that she had lost him.

Yasmin had invited a friend for supper. They ate at the table. Behind Yasmin, unhung abstract paintings leaned against one of the large windows.

Yasmin’s friend was a yellow-haired woman named Hilde. Hilde, like Yasmin, smiled a lot and looked pretty when she did. Without the smile, her round, plain, coarse-featured face with its large brown eyes was placid and bovine until reanimated by another smile.

“We don’t get many visitors from up there, as a rule,” Hilde said as she poured some wine.

“Actually, I’m from Luna, but I spend much of my time in upper Earthspace. I doubt I’ll be here long.”

“Well, you might want to stay.” Hilde picked at her food while Yasmin devoured hers. “Some visitors do. It’s very peaceful here.”

Nola concentrated on her food. Yasmin had served her too much. Hilde was eating very slowly, as if trying to make the dinner last as long as possible; Yasmin was already helping herself to seconds.

Hilde said, “Sometimes I think I’m ready to depart.” Her low nasal voice rose a bit. “And then I lose the feeling, and I’m caught again.”

Yasmin nodded. “I’m not ready. When it comes, it comes.” She ran a hand through her short black hair. “Suicide wouldn’t be right.” Nola lifted her head, startled. “I’m just grateful the fear is no longer with me.”

“The fear?” Nola said.

Yasmin turned toward her. “You’ve seen it, haven’t you?” She hooked her stubby fingers around her wineglass. “Maybe it isn’t the same for you, you’re probably used to danger.”