“Yes. And I am Swan Second Swan. But I’m not monogamous.”
“No?”
“No. Except I’m faithful to endorphins.”
He frowned, but assumed she was joking and tried to go along. “Isn’t that just like having a dog or something?”
“I like dogs. Dogs are wolves.”
“But wolves are not monogamous.”
“No. But endorphins are.”
He sighed, feeling he had lost her point, or that she had. “It’s the touch of the beloved that stimulates endorphins,” he said, and left it at that. You couldn’t whistle the end of the “Moonlight Sonata.”
T
hat night, as they slept in the tunnel on their little aerogel mattresses under their thin blankets, he awoke to find that Swan had moved, and was sleeping against him back to back. The resulting flood of oxytocin relieved his sore hips a little; this was how one could read it. Of course the urge to sleep with someone, the pleasure in sleeping with someone, was not exactly synonymous with sex. Which was reassuring. Across the floor indeed the three ferals were curled together like kittens. The tunnels were warm, often
too warm, but right on the floor it got cold. Very faintly he heard her purring. Feline genes for same—yes, he had heard of it—people said it felt good, very like humming. Feel pleasure, purr, feel better: a positive feedback into more pleasure, loop, loop, loop, all at the pace of breathing, it sounded like when he listened to her. A different kind of music. Although he knew very well that sick cats sometimes purred at a momentary relief, or even as if hoping to feel better, trying to jump-start the loop. He had lived with a cat who had done that near its end. A fifty-year-old cat is an impressive creature. The loss of this ancient eunuch had been one of Wahram’s first losses, so he remembered its purr near the end as particularly pitiful, the sound of some emotion too crowded to name. A good friend of his had died purring. So now this purr from Swan gave him a little shiver of worry.
D
own the tunnel after a sleep, groggy and dim. The morning hour. Whistle the slow movement from the
Eroica
, Beethoven’s funeral music for his sense of hearing, written as it was dying inside him. “ ‘We live an hour and it is always the same,’ ” he recited. Then the slow movement of the first of the late quartets, opus 127, variations on a theme, so rich; as majestic as the funeral march, but more hopeful, more in love with beauty. And then the third movement that followed was so strong and cheerful it could have been a fourth movement.
Swan gave him a black look. “Damn you,” she said, “you’re enjoying this.”
His bass croak of laughter felt good in his chest, a little hadrosauric. “ ‘Danger to him was like wine,’ ” he growled.
“What’s that?”
“The
Oxford English Dictionary
. Or that’s where I saw it.”
“You like quotations.”
“ ‘We have come a long way, we have a long way to go. In between we are somewhere.’ ”
“Come on, what’s that? A fortune cookie?”
“Reinhold Messner, I believe.”
He really was kind of enjoying it, he had to admit. Only twenty-five more days, more or less; it wasn’t such a big number. He could endure. It was the most iterative pseudoiterative he would ever live, thus interesting, as a kind of limit case of what he supposedly wanted. A reductio ad absurdum. And the tunnel was not so much a matter of sensory deprivation as it was sensory overload, but in very few elements: the walls of the tunnel, the lights running along its ceiling fore and aft for as far as they could see.
But Swan was not enjoying it. This particular day seemed worse than any before, in fact. She even slowed down, something he had never seen before, to the point where he had to slow down a bit to keep from getting well ahead of her.
“Are you all right?” he asked after waiting for her to catch up.
“No. I feel like crap. I guess it’s happening. Do you feel anything?”
In fact Wahram was sore in his hips, knees, and feet. His ankles were all right. His back was all right once he got walking. “I’m sore,” he admitted.
“I’m worried about that last solar flare we saw. By the time you see one of those, there’s faster radiation that’s come off the snap. I’m afraid we might have gotten cooked. I feel shitty.”
“I’m just sore. But then, you covered me at the elevator.”
“It probably hit us differently. I hope so. Let’s ask the ferals how they feel.”
They did at the next stop, where, by the looks on their faces, the sunwalkers had waited long enough to be concerned. Tron said, “How goes it?”
“I’m feeling sick,” Swan said. “How are you three feeling?”
They looked at each other. “All right,” Tron said.
“No nausea or diarrhea? No headaches or muscle soreness? No hair coming out?”
The three sunwalkers looked at each other, shrugged. They had gone down the elevator earlier.
“I’m not very hungry,” Tron said, “but the food isn’t very good.”
“My arm is still sore,” Nar offered.
Swan looked resentfully at them. They were sunwalkers, young and strong; they were doing what they did all the time, except underground and widdershins. She looked at Wahram. “What about you?”
Wahram said, “I’m sore. I can’t go much faster than I already am, or longer, or something will break.”
Swan nodded. “Same for me. I may even have to slow down. I feel bad. So I wonder if the three of you should hurry on ahead, and when you get to the sunset, or run into people, you can tell them about us.”
The sunwalkers nodded. “How will we know when we’re there?” Tron asked.
“In a couple of weeks, when you come to stations, you can go up in the elevator and have a look.”
“All right.” Tron looked at Tor and Nar, and they all nodded. “We’ll go get help.”
“That’s right. Don’t go out so fast you hurt yourselves.”
A
fter that Wahram and Swan walked on their own. An hour walking, a half hour sitting, over and over for nine times; then a long meal and a sleep. An hour was a long time; nine of them, with their rests, felt like a couple of weeks. They whistled from time to time, but Swan was not feeling well, and Wahram did not want to do it on his own, unless she asked him to. She stopped and fell back in the tunnel from time to time to relieve herself; “I’ve got the runs,” she said at one point, “I’ve got to empty my suit.” After that she only would say, “Wait a minute,” and then, after five or ten minutes, catch up to him again, and on they would go. She looked desiccated. She became irritable and often spoke viciously to Pauline, and
sometimes to Wahram too. Querulous, disagreeable, unpleasant. Wahram would get annoyed with how unfair she was, how pointless the unpleasantness she created out of nothing, and he would hike along speechlessly, whistling dark little fragments under his breath. In these moments he struggled to remember a lesson from his crèche, which was that with moody people you had to discount the low points in their cycle, or it would not work at all. His crèche had numbered six, and one had been moody to the point of bipolarity, and in the end this had been what caused the group to semi-disband, Wahram believed; he himself had been one of those least able to see that person in their whole amplitude. Six people had thirty relationships in it, and hex wisdom had it that all but one or two of these had to be good for a crèche to endure. They hadn’t even come close to that, but later Wahram had realized that the moody one in the upper half of his cycle was one of the people he most missed out of the group. Had to recall that and learn from it.
Then a time came when ten minutes passed with Swan back down the hall, and she didn’t return; and then he thought he heard a groan.
So he went back and found her sprawled on the floor, semiconscious at best, with her spacesuit down her to ankles and her excretion obviously interrupted midcourse. And she was indeed groaning.
“Oh no!” he said, and crouched by her side. She had her long-sleeved shirt still on, but under it her flesh was blue with cold on the side that had been on the ground. “Swan, can you hear me? Are you hurt?”
He held up her head; her eyes were swimming a little. “Damn,” he said. He didn’t want to pull her spacesuit up over the mess between her legs. “Here,” he said, “I’m going to clean you up.” Like anyone he had done his share of diaper changes, on both babies and elders, and knew the drill. And one pocket of his suit had his toilet tissues; he himself had had to deploy them in a hurry a few times recently, which now worried him more than it had.
And he had water, and even some moist pads in foil packets, courtesy of his suit. So he got them out and shifted her legs around and cleaned her up. Even with his eyes averted he could not help seeing in the tangle of her pubic hair a small penis and testicles, about where her clitoris might have been, or just above. A gynandromorph; it did not surprise him. He finished cleaning her up, trying to be meticulous but fast, and then he pulled her arms over his shoulders and lifted her—she was heavier than he would have thought—and pulled up her spacesuit, and got the top part around her waist and sat her back down on the ground. Got the arms of the suit onto her. Happily a suit’s AI worked Jeeveslike to help the occupant into it. He considered her little backpack, there on the ground; it had to be taken. He decided to put it back on her. With all that arranged, he lifted her up and carried her before him in his arms. Her head lolled back too far for his liking and he stopped.
“Swan, can you hear me?”
She groaned, blinked. He got his arm behind her neck and head and hefted her up again. “What?” she said.
“You passed out,” he said. “While you were having the runs.”
“Oh,” she said. She pulled her head upright, put her arms around his neck. He started walking again. She was not that heavy, now that he had her help in holding her. “I could feel a vasovagal coming on,” she said. “Am I getting my period again?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“It feels like it, I’m cramping. But I don’t think I have enough body fat to do it.”
“Maybe not.”
Suddenly she jerked in his arms, pulled away to look at him face to face. “Oh my. Hey look—some people don’t like to touch me. I have to tell you. You know those people who ingest some of the aliens from Enceladus?”
“Ingest?”
“Yes. An infusion of that bacterial suite. They eat some of the
Enceladans; it’s supposed to be good for you. I did that. A long time ago. So, well, some people don’t like the idea. Don’t even like to be in contact with a person who’s done it.”
Wahram gulped uneasily, felt a jolt of queasiness. Was that the alien bug, or just the thought of the bug? No way to tell. What was done was done, he could not change it. “As I recall,” he said, “the Enceladan life suite is not regarded as being particularly infectious?”
“No, that’s right. But it is conveyed in bodily fluids. I mean, it has to get into your blood, I think. Although I drank mine. Maybe it only has to get into the gut; that’s right. That’s why people worry. So…”
“I’ll be all right,” Wahram said. He carried her for a while, aware that she was inspecting his face. Judging by what he saw in the mirror when he shaved, he did not think there would be much to see.
Without intending to, he said, “You’ve done some strange things to yourself.”
She made a face and looked away. “Moral condemnation of other people is always rather rude, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I do. Of course. Though I notice we do it all the time. But I was speaking of strangeness only. No condemnation implied.”
“Oh sure. Strangeness is so good.”
“Well, isn’t it? We’re all strange.”
She turned her head to look at him again. “I am, I know that. In lots of ways. You saw another way, I suppose.” Glancing at her lap.
“Yes,” Wahram said. “Although that’s not what makes you strange.”
She laughed weakly.
“You’ve fathered children?” he asked.
“Yes. I suppose you think that’s strange too.”
“Yes,” he said seriously. “Though I am an androgyn, myself, and once gave birth to a child. So, you know—it strikes me as a very strange experience, no matter which way it happens.”
She pulled her head back to inspect him, clearly surprised. “I didn’t know that.”
“It wasn’t really relevant to one’s actions in the present,” Wahram said. “Part of one’s past, you know. And anyway, it seems to me most spacers of a certain age have tried almost everything, don’t you think?”
“I guess so. How old are you?”
“I’m a hundred and eleven, thank you. What about you?”
“A hundred and thirty-five.”
“Very nice.”
She shifted in his arms, lifting a fist in a mime of threatening him. By way of a riposte he said, “Do you think you can walk now?”
“Maybe. Let me try.”
He put her feet down, pulled her upright. She leaned against him. She hobbled along for a bit holding his arm, then stood straight and proceeded on her own, slowly.
“We don’t have to walk, you know,” he said. “I mean, we can get to the next station and wait there.”
“Let’s see how I feel. We can decide when we get there.”
Wahram said, “Do you think it was the sun that made you sick? Because I must say, for being in M g, I’m feeling very sore in my joints.”
She shrugged. “We took a shot big enough to kill our comms. Pauline says I took ten sieverts.”
“Wow.” The LD 50 was about thirty, he thought. “My wristpad would have flagged it if I’d taken that much. I checked and it was only up three. But you covered me while we were waiting for the elevator.”
“Well, there was no reason both of us should take a full hit.”
“I suppose. But we could have taken turns.”
“You didn’t know about the flare. What’s your lifetime total?”
“I’m at around two hundred,” he said. They all relied on the
DNA repair component of the longevity treatment to stay in space as much as they did.
“Not bad,” she said. “I’m at five.” She sighed. “This could be it. Or maybe it just killed the bacteria in my gut. I think that’s what’s happened. I hope. Although my hair is falling out too.”
“My joints are probably just sore from all the walking,” Wahram said.
“Could be. What do you do for aerobics?”