“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.
Ever 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.
They 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 sile
nce. 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.”
“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.
Maybe 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.
She 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.
KIRAN ON ICE
It 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 origin
al 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 CO2 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.