Well, Swan thought. Here they were. Nothing to be done, except to wait. Waiting was never her preferred mode. Typically there was more to do than she had time for, so that she was always in a rush. Now it seemed long for a rescue from an evacuation. As they had been bailing out, there had been talk of ships in the area. Maybe Wahram had been knocked off in a strange direction; Swan had followed without any sense of that. Possibly they were leaving the plane of the ecliptic, thus the path of any ships coming to the rescue. Maybe the poor destroyed yacht was the only one in their area, and they would have to wait until all the other evacuees had been mopped up. The destruction of the little yacht was likely to be one of the chief sources of casualties in the whole affair, so surely that would attract attention. They would know they hadn’t collected everybody; they would keep looking; these suits had powerful transponders in them. Being out of the ecliptic thus probably best explained the delay. Or maybe picking everyone up was just taking a while. The last acceleration of the
ETH Mobile
might have meant it was going at a speed higher than most spaceships could reach when the last people left it, in which case the people were too. If everything was as it was supposed to be, then all the suits would support their occupants for ten days, and they had only been out there only, what—she had to ask Pauline—twenty hours. It seemed longer, shorter—she couldn’t tell. Venus was definitely a little bigger. Swan recalled stories of castaways, adrift unfound, frozen for the eons. How many had gone that way in the history of the world? Scores, hundreds, thousands? She heard in her head the chorus of the old Martian song:
I floated thinking of Peter
Sure I would be saved
But the stories lie
I’m left to die
Black space will be my grave
No doubt many of those unfortunates had drifted expecting till the end they would be saved. Hope drained away more slowly than the air and food in their suits; they would recall the story of Peter circling Mars, or some other marooned person who got rescued, and believe a little spaceship would presently appear and hover before them like a UFO, like redemption, like life itself. But for many it had never come, and at some last point they had had to admit that the story was false, or not true for them. True for others, but not for them; the others elect, they the preterite, the lost ones. The forgotten ones. Thus the stark Martian song.
Maybe this time they would join the forgotten ones. Swan stirred herself, checked the common band, a host of voices; went to the emergency band and croaked out a report, an inquiry. Half an hour later a reply came: they were on the radar, they were getting a rescue ship out to them; they were indeed out of the plane, and all responders were busy. But they were on the charts and help would be on its way eventually.
So… look around. Tell Wahram about it, reassure him. Try to relax.
She was not relaxed. A helpless dread seized her like a boiling of the blood. Pauline would therefore know of it; she might at this very moment be infusing her with antianxiety drugs out of the suit’s pharmacy. Swan hoped so. Nothing to do but wait. Keep breathing. Wait and see. It had been a luxury in her life always to be able to do something, never to have to wait. Now reality kicked in. Sometimes you had to wait for it.
Well, so be it. A wait wasn’t so bad. It was better than the blackliner. Venus was looking a little bit closer, and was maybe a little bit brighter—maybe the sunshield had been torn a little, at the
edge nearest the explosion. She could see dark clouds swirling around a darker patch, possibly Ishtar’s highland. There were brighter and darker patches down there under the swirling clouds, but she had no sense of whether they represented frozen ocean or frozen land. There were no blues or browns or greens, just gray clouds over gray lands, dark and darker.
I
feel better,” Wahram announced uncertainly, as if testing the assertion.
“Oh good,” Swan said. “Try drinking something. You’re probably dehydrated.”
“I am thirsty.”
More time passed. After a while Wahram began to whistle under his breath, one of the tunes he had whistled in the utilidor. Beethoven, she knew, and not one of the symphonies; so most likely it was from one of the late quartets. A slow movement. Possibly the one that Beethoven had written after recovering from an illness. A thanksgiving. She would only know for sure by the tune that came at the very end of it. It was one of the good ones, anyway. Softly she whistled an accompaniment to it, singing the lark inside her while squeezing his hand. The tune was slow, she could not just lark about in it, but had to find a way to be slow herself, to join him. Her lark brain remembered the parts to this tune that he had taught her under Mercury. During their submercurial existence, a whole lifetime ago it seemed. That life was gone; this one would go; not a lot of difference was made to this moment itself, whether they survived later or not. Oh the beauty of this song, something to twine with. The lark brain kept singing inside her, twisting up out of the slow tune. Different times get woven together.
“Do you remember?” she asked him after breaking off. Voice tight, grip crushing his hand: “Do you remember when we were in the tunnel?”
“Yes, I do.”
Then back to the tune. His whistling was just barely adequate; or he whistled now in a style that made it seem so. Maybe he was still hurting. Musically they had been better in the tunnel. Now they sounded like Armstrong and Fitzgerald, him pretending to a straining effort that only barely hit an accidental and minimal perfection, her perfect without any effort at all, just playing around. Duet of opposites. The struggle and the play, making together something better than either. Maybe you needed both. Maybe she had been making her play into a struggle when she needed to be making her struggle into play.
They came to the melody at the end; yes, it was the thanksgiving. Hymn of thanksgiving after recovering from a serious illness, Wahram had said it was called, in the Lydian mode. And the title described the feeling well; they didn’t always. A thanksgiving laid into the tune itself, with an unerring ear for music as the speech of feeling. How could it be? Who had he been? Beethoven, the human nightingale. There are songs in our brains, she thought, whether bird brain cells have been inserted in them or not; they were already there, down in the cerebellum, conserved for millions of years. No death there; maybe death
was
an illusion, maybe these patterns lived forever, music and emotion stranding through universes one after the next, on the wings of transient birds.
E
ver since the tunnel,” she said to him when he stopped whistling, “we’ve had a relationship.”
“Mmm,” he said, either agreeing or not.
“Don’t you think so?” she demanded.
“Yes, I do.”
“If we hadn’t wanted to run into each other, we could have avoided it. So I’ve been thinking that that’s not what we wanted. That we wanted…”
“Hmm,” he equivocated.
“What do you mean? Are you denying it?”
“No.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“I mean,” he said slowly, thinking it over, pausing, then seeming to lose the inclination to speak. Through his faceplate she could see that he was looking at her at last, rather than out at the stars, and that struck her as a good sign, but it was unnerving as well, he was so grave and intent. This diving into the mind was amphibious work, and her toad was performing it abstracted and silent.
“I like being with you,” he continued. “It seems to me things are more interesting when I’m with you.” He continued to stare at her. “I like whistling with you. I liked our time in the tunnel.”
“You liked it?”
“But of course. You know that.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t know what I know or don’t know. That’s part of my problem.”
“I love you,” he said.
“But of course,” she said. “And I love you.”
“No no,” he said. “I
love
you.”
“I see!” she said. “But oh dear—I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
He smiled his littlest smile. It was so small, now almost hidden behind his faceplate, and yet it appeared only when he was truly amused. It was never a polite gesture. When he was being polite he glared.
“Neither do I know what I mean,” he said. “But I say it anyway. Wanting to say it to you—it’s that kind of love.”
“Uh-oh,” she said. “Look, this is crazy talk. Your leg is frozen and you’ve got to be in shock. Your suit has you shot up with all kinds of stuff.”
“Very likely true,” he conceded a bit dreamily, “but even so, that is only allowing me to say what I really feel. With some urgency, let us say.”
He smiled again, but briefly; he was watching her like a… well,
she didn’t know what. Not like a hawk; not anything like a wolf’s long stare; more a curious look, a questioning look—a froggy inquiry, as if to ask, what kind of creature was she? Robot? Limit? Robber? Robert?
Well, she didn’t know. She couldn’t say. Her toad regarded her, eyes like jasper marbles in his head. She regarded him: so slow, so particularly himself, self-contained, ritualistic… if that was right. She tried to put together all she had seen of him into a single phrase or characterization, and it didn’t work; she had a jumble of pieces, of small incidents and feelings, and then their big time together, which was also a jumble and a smear. But interesting! This was the heart of it, this word he had used, maybe. He interested her. She was drawn to him as to a work of art or a landscape. He had a sense of his actions that was sure; he drew a clean line. He showed her new things, but also new feelings. Oh to be calm! Oh to pay attention! He amazed her with these qualities.
“Hmm, well, I love you too,” she said. “We’ve been through a lot. Let me think about it. I haven’t thought about it in the way you seem to be implying.”
“Suggesting,” he suggested.
“Okay, well yes, then. I’ll think about what it means.”
“Very good.” Again he smiled his little smile.
T
hey floated there in the black suffused with white. The diamond glitter: there were said to be a hundred thousand stars visible to the naked eye when one was in space. It would seem a difficult tally to make and was probably just a computer count, down to the magnitude considered visible to the average eye. To her there seemed to be many more than a hundred thousand.
They blobbed weightlessly, they jiggled as she blinked and breathed. She could hear her breath and her heartbeat, also the blood moving in her ears. The animal rush of herself in space, through time. Pulse after pulse. As she had lived a century and a
third, her heart had beaten around five billion times. It seemed like a lot until you began to count. Counting itself implied a finite number, which was by definition too short. An odd sensation.
But counting your breaths was a Buddhist ceremony too, folded into the sun worship on Mercury. She had done it before. Here they were, confronted with the universe, seeing it from inside the fortresses of spacesuits and bodies. Hearing the body, seeing the stars and the deep black expanse. There were the Andromeda constellation and in it the Andromeda Galaxy, an elliptical smear rather than a dense little point. By thinking about what it was, Swan could sometimes pop the third dimension even farther into the black—not only perceive the depth of field variously punctured by stars at different distances, which one could pretend were marked by their brightness, but also see Andromeda as a whole galaxy, far farther away than anything else she could see—
thwoop
, there it was, deepest space, the extension of the vacuum evident to her eye. Those were awesome moments, and truthfully they didn’t last long, they couldn’t, it was too vast; the human eye and mind were not equipped to see it. Mostly it had to be an imaginative leap, she knew; but when that idea clicked with what she was actually seeing at that very second, it could become very much like something completely real.
Now that happened again, and there she was in it: the universe at full size. Thirteen point seven billion years of expansion, and more to come; indeed with the expansion accelerating, it could bloom outward like a coronal flare off the sun, dissipate all that was burning in it. That looked to be happening right now, right before her eyes.
“I’m tripping,” she said. “I’m seeing Andromeda as a galaxy, it’s punching a hole right through the blackness there, like I’m seeing in a new dimension.”
“Do you want some Bach?” he asked. “To go with it?”
She had to laugh. “What do you mean?”
“I’m listening to Bach’s cello suite,” he said. “It’s a very good match for the scene, I find. Do you want to patch in?”
“Sure.”
A single cello line, solemn but nimble, threaded through the night.
“Where did you get this? Did your suit have it?”
“No, my wrist AI. It doesn’t do much compared to your Pauline, but this it does.”
“I see. So you carry a weak AI with you?”
“Yes, that’s right.” A particularly expressive passage of the Bach filled the silence. The cello was almost like a third party to the conversation.
“Don’t you have anything less lugubrious?” Swan inquired.
“I suppose I do, but in fact I find this very spritely.”
She laughed. “You would!”
He hummed at that, thinking it over. “We could change to Debussy’s piano music,” he said after the cello executed a particularly deep sawing, its buzzy timbre black as space. “I think that might be just the thing for you.”
Piano replaced cello, the clear bell-like sounds darting and flowing in runs, making melodies that ran like cats’ paws over water. Debussy had had a bird mind, she could hear, and she whistled a phrase repeating one of his, fitting it into what followed. Hard to do. She stopped. “Very nice,” she said.
He squeezed her hand. “I wish I could whistle it along with you, but I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“It’s too hard for me to remember. When I hear it, it always surprises me. I mean, I recognize it when I hear it played, I’ve heard it ten thousand times, but if I’m not hearing it out loud, I couldn’t whistle you the tunes from memory, they’re too… too elusive, I suppose, or subtle. Glancing. Unexpected. And they don’t seem to repeat. Listen—it keeps moving on to a new thing.”