“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?”
“I walk.”
“That’s not much of a test of your aerobic system.”
“I huff and I puff as I walk and I talk.” Trying to distract her.
“Another quote?”
“I think I made that up. One of my mantras for the daily routine.”
“Daily routine.”
“I like routine.”
“No wonder you’re happy in here.”
“It’s true that there is a routine here.”
They trudged down the tunnel in silence for a long time. When they got to the next station, they declared it a day and settled in to rest a few extra hours, as well as sleep through their night. Once Swan walked back down the tunnel to do something, then returned, and she fell asleep and seemed to sleep well, without purring. The next morning she wanted to carry on walking, declaring she would go slow and be careful. So off they went.
The lights kept appearing ahead out of the distant floor, then up and over them in their long arc. The effect was as if they were always about to walk downhill. Wahram tried to keep sight of one particular light, but could not be sure he had kept track of it from its first appearance to overhead. It could be some kind of unit: the view to horizon; multiplied how many times, he was not quite sure. “Can you ask Pauline to calculate our view distance to the horizon?” he asked at one point.
“I know it,” Swan said shortly. “It’s three kilometers.”
“I see.”
Suddenly it didn’t seem to make much difference.
Shall we whistle?” Wahram asked after they had walked in silence for half an hour.
“No,” she said. “I’m all whistled out. Tell me a story. Tell me your story, I want to hear more things that I don’t know about you.”
“Easy enough, to be sure.” Although suddenly he could not think exactly how to start. “Well, I was born a hundred and eleven years ago, on Titan. My mother was a wombman who came originally from Callisto, a third-generation Jovian, and my father was an androgyn from Mars, exiled in one of their political conflicts. I grew up mostly on Titan, but it was very constrained in those days, a matter of stations and just a few small domes. So I also lived in Herschel for some years as I went to school, then also on Phoebe, and one of the polar orbiters, and then, recently, Iapetus. Almost everyone in the Saturn system moves around to get a sense of the whole, especially if you’re involved with the civil service.”
“Do many people do that?”
“Everyone has to do the basic training, and give a certain amount of time to Saturn, as they say, and they may also get drafted in the lottery for some position in the government. Some get drafted and grow to like it and then do more. That’s what I did. One of my last mandatories was on Hyperion, and it was very small, but I really grew fond of that place, it was so strange.”
“There’s that word again.”
“Well, life is strange, or so it seems to me.” He sang, “People are strange,
when you’re a stranger,” and then cut it short. “Hyperion is truly strange. It’s apparently the remnant of a collision between two moons of about equal size. What’s left looks like the side of a honeycomb, and the ridges bracketing the holes are white, while the powder filling every hole about halfway is black. So when you walk the ridges, or float over that side of the moon, it is very like some supremely bold work of art.”
“A big old goldsworthy,” she said.
“Sort of. And it’s an easy place to disturb by one’s presence. So it’s been a question how to set up a station, even whether to set one up, and how it should be run if one is put there permanently. Having helped with that, I have the sense of being a curator or something.”
“Interesting.”
“I thought so. So, I went back to Iapetus, which is also a superb place to live; it’s kind of a pulling back, and at an angle, to give you a better view of the whole system, and of why it should evoke such feeling. There I studied terraforming governance, and the diplomatic arts, such as they are—”
“The honest man sent by his country to lie for it?”
“Oh, I would hope that is not an accurate description of a diplomat. It’s not mine, and I hope not yours.”
“I don’t think we get to choose what words mean.”
“No? I think we do.”
“Only within very tight limits,” she said. “But go on.”
“Well, after that I went back to Titan and worked on the terraforming there. In those years I had my children.”
“With partners?”
“Yes, my crèche had six parents and eight children. I see them all from time to time. It’s almost always a pleasure. I try not to worry about them. I love the kids; I remember parts of their lives they don’t remember themselves. I think that’s of more interest to me than to them. That’s all right. Memory is a haunting. You remember times you liked, and you want something like them. But you can only get new things. So I try to want what I get. It isn’t obvious how to do it. You get into your second century and it gets hard, I think.”
“It was never not hard,” she said.
“True. This world is very mysterious to me. I mean, I hear what people say about the universe, but I don’t know how to put it to use. To me it sounds meaningless. So I agree with those who say we have to make our own meaning. The concept of the project I find useful. Something you do in the present, and can remember doing in the past, and expect to do in the future, in order to create something. A work of art which need not be in the arts per se, but something human worth doing.”
“That’s existentialism, yes?”
“Yes, I think that’s right. I don’t see how you can avoid it.”
“Hmm.” She thought about it. The light gleamed off her black hair in white streaks. “Tell me about your crèche. How did that work?”
“On Titan there would be groups of people around the same age, who were educated together and worked together. Smaller cohorts would band together out of these to raise children. Usually it was in groups of half a dozen or so. There were different ways to structure them. It depended on compatibilities. There was a feeling at the time that pair-bonds didn’t have enough people in them to endure over the long haul—that they succeeded less than half the time, and children needed more. So there would be some larger number. Almost everyone thought of it as a child-raising method and not a lifelong arrangement. Thus the name crèche. Eventually there were a lot of hurt feelings involved. But if you’re lucky, it can be good for a while, and you just have to take that and move on when the time comes. I still stay in touch with them; we’re even still a crèche. But the kids are grown, and we very rarely see each other.”
“I see.”
A long time of silent walking passed, and Wahram was feeling rather companionable, and not too sore.
Then Swan said vehemently, “I can’t stand it in here. There’s no chance of changing. It’s like a prison, or a school.”
“Our submercurial life,” he said, just a little offended, as he had been enjoying himself. On the other hand, she was ill. “It will soon enough come to an end.”
“Not soon enough.” She shook her head gloomily.
They walked on, hour after hour. Everything stayed the same. Swan walked better than she had right after her collapse, but she was still slower than she had been before it. It didn’t matter to Wahram; he liked the slower pace, in fact. He was still quite sore in the mornings, but did not seem to be getting any worse; nor did he feel weak or nauseous, though he was on the lookout for the symptoms in an uncomfortable way. He felt queasy a lot. Swan had pulled off all the hair on her head, leaving a fair number of scabby patches.
“What about you?” he said at one point. “Tell me more about you. Did you really lie naked on blocks of ice for hours at a time? Did you cut orreries into your skin and make patterns of blood on you?”
She was walking ahead of him, and now she hesitated, then stopped and let him take the lead. “I don’t want to shout back at you,” she said as he passed her.
“And yes,” she said as they carried on, “I did do those things, and other kinds of abramovics. The body is very good material for art, I think. But that was mostly when I was in my fifties.”
“What about before?”
“I was born in Terminator, as I said. It was just being constructed, and I was a kid in the farm when they were still putting in the irrigation systems. It was a big deal when the soil arrived. It came out of big tubes, like wet cement, only black. I played in there with my mother while they were getting the first crops and the park plants started. It was a great place to be a kid. It’s hard to believe that it’ll all be dead when we come up. I’ll have to see it to believe it. Anyway that’s where I grew up.”
“The past is always gone,” Wahram said. “Whether the place is still there or not.”
“Maybe for you, oh sage one,” she said. “I never felt that way. Anyway, after that I lived on Venus for a while, working for Shukra. Then I designed terraria. Then I moved into making artworks, working with landscapes or bodies. Goldsworthies and abramovics, still very interesting to me, and how I make my living. So I’m out and about, following commissions. But I keep a room in Terminator. My parents both died, so my grandparents Alex and Mqaret were kind of like my parents. You couldn’t have made any critique of pair-bonding by looking at those two. Poor Mqaret.”
“No, I know,” he said. “It was child rearing I was talking about, that seems to take more than two people. You must have learned that too?”
She shot him a glance. “One of them is out there somewhere. The child I had with Zasha died.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes, well, she was old. I don’t want to talk about that right now.”
In fact she was slowing down, and seemed to him hunched over. He said, “Are you all right?”
“Feeling weaker.”
“Do you want to stop and rest?”
“No.”
On they struggled, in silence.
He helped her through one hour, supporting her as she walked with one of his arms around her back and under her far arm, pulling up. After the rests she struggled up and continued walking, and would brook no argument against it. When they got to the next station, he looked around in every cabinet and closet in the place, and in the last closet he checked (but it was always the last one, when you found something) there was a little four-wheeled pushcart with a bar on one end that rose to chest height; otherwise it was a flatbed set just above wheel height, the bed one meter by two, and the two swiveling wheels opposite the bar.
“Let’s put our backpacks on here and I’ll push them,” he suggested.
She gave him a look. “You think you can push me around.”
“It would be easier than carrying you, if it came to that.”
She dumped her backpack on the cart, and the next morning took off ahead of him. At first he had to hurry; then he caught up with her; then he slowed down as she did.
/>
Hour after hour. Without discussing it, she would sometimes sit on the cart. Up on the surface over them passed the craters and scarps named after the great artists of Earth; they went under Ts’ao Chan, Philoxenus, Rm, Ives. He whistled “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” which Ives had incorporated so memorably into one of his wild compositions. He thought of Rm’s “I Died as Mineral” and wished he had it memorized better. “I died as mineral and rose as a plant, I died as plant and was born an animal; when did I ever lose by dying?”
“Who is that?”
“Rm.”
More silence. Down the big curve of the tunnel. The walls here were cracked, and it looked like they had been heat-treated more than usual to fuse them to impermeability. Crazed glazes of black on black. Craquelure to infinity.
She groaned and stood up from the cart and walked back to the west. “One moment, I have to go again.”
“Oh dear. Good luck.”
After a long while he heard a distant groan, maybe even a forlorn “Help.” He went back down the tunnel, pulling the cart with him.
She had collapsed again with her suit down. Again he had to clean her up. She was a little more conscious this time, and looked away; even at one point batted weakly at him. In the middle of his work she looked at him blearily, resentfully. “This isn’t really me,” she said. “I’m not really here.”