“Beautiful,” she said, and whistled another nightingale descant.
After a long while, he turned the music off. The silence was immense. Again she could hear her breath, her heartbeat. It was thumping away in its double thump, a little faster than normal, but no longer racing. Calm down, she thought again. You’re marooned in space, they will rescue you eventually. Meanwhile here you are, and Wahram is with you, and Pauline. No moment is ever fundamentally different from this one. Focus and be calm.
M
aybe to say that someone was “like this” or “like that” was just an attempt to stick a memory to a board where you organized memories, like butterflies in a lepidopterist’s collection. Not really the generalization it seemed, but just a stab at understanding. Was Wahram anything like what she might say about him, if she tried to say something? He was like this, he was like that—she didn’t really know. One had impressions of other people, nothing more. Never to hear them think, only to hear what they said; it was a drop in an ocean, a touch across the abyss. A hand holding your hand as you float in the black of space. It wasn’t much. They couldn’t really know each other very well. So they said he is like this, or she is like that, and called that the person. Presumed to make a judgment. It was such a guess. You would have to talk with someone for years to give the guess any kind of validity. And even then you wouldn’t know.
When I’m with you, she said to Wahram in her mind as they floated there together, waiting, holding hands—when I’m with you I feel faintly anxious; judged; inadequate. Not the kind of person you like, which I find offensive, and thus behave more like that part of me than ever. Though I want your good opinion too. But that desire I find irritating, and so contradict it in myself. Why should I care? You don’t care.
And yet you do care. I
love
you, you said. And—Swan admitted to herself—she wanted him to feel that way when he was with her. That way—is this what love was, this desire for a feeling that
remained unclear even when felt? Is that why people sometimes thought of it as a madness? The words stay the same, even the feelings stay the same, but there are slippages between the words and the feelings, hard to track. The desire to know, to be known, to be cherished for what you are and not what others think you should be… But then, what you are… It was hard for her not to feel that a person loving her was making a big mistake. Because she knew herself better than they did, so knew their love was given in error. And thus they must be some kind of fool. And yet it was precisely that misplaced love she wanted. Someone who would like you more than you do. Someone who likes you despite yourself, someone more generous to you than you are. That was how Alex had been. And when you see that, when you feel that—feel loved beyond justice, from some kind of generosity—that sets off certain other feelings. A kind of a glow. A spillover. It caused something to start that felt reciprocal. A mutual recognition. The hall of mirrors again. Set a lased beam of light between two mirrors, back and forth the beam bounces, two parts of something more; not just the beast with two backs (though that too, for sure, and a great thing, a great animal) but something else, some kind of… pairing, like Pluto and Charon, with the center of gravity between the two. Not a single supra-organism, but two working together on something not themselves. A duet. A harmony.
S
he whistled one of the other Beethoven tunes Wahram had often whistled in the tunnel; she still had trouble sorting which was which, but knew this was the other song of thanks, the one after the big storm, when all the creatures come back out into the sun. A simple melody, like a folk tune. She chose it because it was one of the few tunes Wahram could whistle a descant to, forging an elaboration he said was in the original. He fired it up and joined in. He wasn’t as strong as he had been before, though he hadn’t been strong then. His whistle had pain threading it like a
golden wire. He was not much of a musician, in all truth. But he had a good memory for the pieces he loved; and he loved them.
She took off and trilled all around him, and he fell back into the main melody in relief. Maybe that was what duets were all about.
“Maybe I love you,” she said. “Maybe that’s what I’ve been feeling these past few years. Maybe I just never knew what it was.”
“Maybe,” he said.
Did he mean that maybes don’t count, or that maybes are better than nothing?
“Slow movement of the Seventh,” he said, “if you don’t mind.” And he was off into another tune from their time under Mercury, one she had always enjoyed riffing on, it had so many possibilities. Sometimes they had gone on with it for hours, for half a day or more. Stately, solemn, elegiac; something like Wahram himself, pacing through the days. On the march. Someone you could rely on.
“Maybe,” she repeated. “It may be.”
They fell into the song as of old, as when they were in the crucible and everything depended on how they went forward. As now, even now, just floating in space waiting for rescue, having faith it would come.
Faith justified; for Pauline said, “Ship approaching.”
One white dot among the rest bloomed, and in a matter of seconds became another little space yacht, a hopper hovering there before them like a dream, bizarre and magical.
“Oh good,” Swan said.
Now they too were Peters. She had to remember that. They were only continuing by way of a rescue. As they puffed over to the little ship, Swan tried to fix what this had felt like—the floating, Andromeda, Wahram’s gaze, their duet. It could have been their last hours. She thought of Alex again. Our stories go on a while, some genes and words persist; then we go away. It was a hard thing to remember. And as the lock door closed and they were back inside, she once again forgot it.
I
t was while Kiran was still being stared at by the eyes in the box that it occurred to him that he should not be seeing something like this, and one quick glance at the tall security guard made it clear that this thought had also occurred to the guard. As the guard started relocking the box Kiran considered what this meant, and before the guard had finished tapping the keypad Kiran was off and dashing back the way they had come. He turned into the first street available and sprinted hard to the next intersection and turned again, with a single glance back; the guard was not yet in view. Off he went at a slightly slower pace, thinking about his options. The train that ran between Vinmara and Cleopatra would certainly be watched, and there was only the one.
Much of the population of the town was still out celebrating the uneclipse and the end of the rain. And he knew where the gate was relative to his current position. He cut right yet again and so toward it. The streets of the seashell town were almost empty. Ahead the gate; none of his new work unit was visible, nor any security guards aside from the ordinary gatekeepers. He gave his original ID card to one of these as he came to the gate lock door, then went in the lock and checked to make sure his suit was secure.
Out onto the snowy hillsides of Venus. People were trooping back down from the hilltop overlooking the bay, and he looked away as he passed them and headed around to the west of town.
When he had gotten past the edge of town he slipped over the hill and out of view of Vinmara, then took a broad wash south, toward the distant ocean.
They were still covering the frozen CO
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down there, so he hoped he could catch a ride from one of the super-zambonis or foamed rock applicators. He wanted to get to Colette, but feared that the whole transportation system would be alerted to look for him. Now it was really hitting home what it meant to be a double agent or a mole or whatever it was he had turned into; it meant neither side would care about you, or care to defend you if problems arose. On the other hand, if he could get to Shukra, he had information Shukra had asked him to obtain. So getting to Colette was the obvious thing to try.
Vinmara was located just south of Onatah Corona. Onatah was the Iroquois corn goddess, his faceplate map told him; no doubt a much friendlier goddess than Lakshmi, who after all was Kali’s boss. Everything Kiran had heard about Lakshmi made him pretty sure that he might not survive her displeasure. At the thought he yelped and took the translation spectacles she had given him from his suit’s chest pocket. Reluctantly, with a final kiss in thanks for all they had done to improve his love life, he tossed them away. Really a shame he had not thought to do so back in the city, but there was no way he was going to return there now.
Since he had been able to see the big rock foamers on the skyline from Vinmara, he had assumed that they could not be too far away. Now, as he walked over the crunchy and sometimes slippery snow downhill toward the dry ice sea, he realized that the new town’s hillside perch might give it a view much farther away than he had reckoned. In fact it could be many kilometers.
This thought was beginning to oppress him when he came over a small ridge in the ice and saw a super-zamboni, not immediately near but just a couple of kilometers away, and lumbering
along slowly in the usual manner. He broke into a trot and tried to pace himself for the run there. It was moving crossways to his approach, so he was going to be all right; no need to kill himself.
Nevertheless he was huffing and puffing by the time he reached the thing. Unfortunately if there was a person or persons inside it, they were not looking out the cabin windows, which were up at the top and front of the thing. There was nothing for Kiran to do except jog next to it and jump up onto its side where a ladder came almost to the ground. Climb the ladder, get on the roof of the thing, which was not only railed, but full of instrumentation to hold on to. Alas it was a bit of exposure to hang over the front and try to reach down to where the windows started, and there was nothing much to hold on to. Seemed as if the windows were in fact still out of reach, which was frustrating.
There was a hatch door, however, in the roof, and when he saw it he began to pound on it with his fists, then kick it with the heels of his boots. He was looking around to see if there was anything he could break off to hit the door with even harder when the behemoth shuddered to a halt, and soon after, he could hear voices below him, and the hatch door opened.
“Thanks!” he shouted. “I got lost out here!”
So two Venusians brought him inside, and he had a very difficult time making up a story for them that would explain his presence down there on the frozen ocean—it had to involve an admission of recreational drug use and even worse, geographical disorientation, so he squirmed his way through it, feeling lucky that embarrassment was the appropriate emotion for his cover story and its lame particulars. Happily the two minders listened to their translator saying it all in Chinese, and merely nodded as if they had often witnessed such foolishness before, and went back to their screen game. They were headed for a working camp under Ba’het Patera, they told him, and would be there in four hours. There was beer in the fridge if he was interested.
The working camp they came to was one of a whole series of them, Kiran saw on the map, running west along the northern shore of the new ocean and sheltering the people who were getting the last of the CO
2
sealed over. Kiran gave his original ID card to the people at the camp, but they only looked at it briefly and waved him over to the galley. He ate voraciously while he pored over the map on his tabletop screen. He had already seen that there were fast little snowmobiles out in the camp’s parking lot, and the map seemed to indicate that the camps dotting the shore were close enough together that a snowmobile could get from one to the next on one fuel load. Maybe that was even part of the plan.
Very nice. And as they kept regular hours despite the perpetual night, he merely waited until everyone had gone to bed, and then went out to one of the snowmobiles, checked that it was full of fuel, fired it up, and took off west.
These snowmobiles were neat little things, more like cars on skis than any of the monsters being used for the sequestration work. He had often enjoyed driving them in his first months on Venus, and now he sat back and gave the AI instructions and watched the eerie dim landscape slide by. The snow here had packed down to what they called firn, and his vehicle zipped right along. It would be an all-night drive, so to speak, but then he could come into the next camp when they were getting up. Maybe just drive into the parking lot and jump into another snowmobile and keep going, why not? No one cared about these vehicles on the ice; they were no one’s property. And there was nowhere to go in them.
Or so he told himself as he fell asleep, and when he woke up and had the AI slide them into the parking lot of the next camp, it worked just as he had hoped. Out of that one, into another, off again; no one the slightest bit concerned. “I love Venus,” he told the AI pilot. His old translation belt said it in Chinese, although
probably the vehicle’s AI understood English too. The old belt was a sad step down from the spectacles, but in this situation it didn’t really matter.
Two more camps, two more snowmobiles, and he came to a camp he had spotted on the maps, one that had a train line spur that would take him up through the Ut Rupes and the Vesta Rupes and eventually to Colette. As he came into the camp he saw a train, at what passed here for a station, which was just a loading dock and a small building. As he slid up on the snowmobile he saw that they were loading some of the cars from a siding, under big lights. Being in the light of the lamps, they could see little outside that cone of illumination, so he crept up on them, staying in the dark, and in the moment when they were finishing their work he threw a rock at the building by the tracks, and when they went to investigate the bang, he hopped up into the car and ducked down behind the boxes inside. Not long after that he was closed into the car, and felt the train jerk forward with maglev smoothness and head up the long slope to Colette, far above him on the Lakshmi Planum, so ominously named.