“No. We flirted a few times—he even kissed me once—but that’s all.” Her fingers belie her casual tone, tracing absently along the curved line of her lower lip. “Actually, he wound up falling for Esther. They were right for each other in a way the two of us never would’ve been.”
“None of this correlates with what I know of human behavior in such situations. You experienced no jealousy or anger?”
Her expression clouds. “At first I did. At first I felt like I would die. Just… drop down and die. But I never let Esther see it. That would’ve devastated her, and she’d have broken up with Jemuel, which would’ve been stupid because it’s not like he would’ve come to me instead. What’s the point? So I kept my mouth shut and pretended I was fine with it until I really was fine. Now when I talk with Jemuel, I can’t believe I was ever into him. He’s kind of stiff, really.”
“But you still sounded wistful, when you spoke of him.” Abel finds himself going back to that memory of her… her dark eyes searching an unseen distance, her fingers brushing her lip.
Noemi says, “I guess it’s just the idea of love I miss. And, well, it was a good kiss.” Her smile turns rueful. “At least I got some practice.”
A wonderful idea occurs to Abel. “Do you need more practice?”
“Huh?”
“We could practice, if you wanted.” He smiles as he starts to explain. “Remember what I told you on Genesis? I’m programmed with a wide array of techniques for providing physical pleasure, via every activity from kissing to the more arcane positions for sexual intercourse. Although I’ve never performed any of them before, I’m confident I could do so very skillfully.”
She stares at him, eyes wide. Since she is swift to voice objections if she has them, Abel takes her silence as an encouraging sign.
So he sits up on the bed to explain the further compelling reasons now coming to mind. “Humans need a certain amount of physical release and comfort in order to be psychologically healthy. You’ve been away from your family and friends for some time, and have endured considerable trauma, suggesting you are in even greater need than usual. I have all the information and technique necessary to be an excellent partner, my body is designed to be appealing, and of course I can neither carry disease nor impregnate you. We have total privacy and many hours of spare time. Conditions for intercourse would seem to be ideal.”
Noemi remains statue-still for another moment, then starts to laugh, but her laugh isn’t unkind. When she finally looks at him again, her cheeks are flushed. “Abel, I’m, uh—it’s nice of you to offer, I guess.” She tucks a lock of black hair behind her ear and bites her lower lip before adding, “But I couldn’t.”
No denying it: Abel feels disappointed. “Why not?”
“Among people of my faith on Genesis, sex is something you save for committed relationships. For people you care about very deeply.”
“You’d suggested your culture wasn’t as puritanical as Earth claimed.”
“It’s not. I mean, sex is a natural part of life. A wonderful part. We all understand that. And some of the faiths are a lot more permissive than the Second Catholic Church. But for me, at least, sex should be with someone I love.”
“I understand,” Abel says, hoping that he does.
She rolls onto her side, toward him, but doesn’t look him in the face as she adds, “You couldn’t have gotten me pregnant anyway. I mean, nobody could. The explosion that killed the rest of my family—it exposed me to some pretty terrible toxins.”
Although Noemi says it evenly, Abel can tell it hurts her deeply, or once did. How can he possibly console her for such a loss?
Finally he settles on, “I feel certain your genetic material would have been of the highest quality.”
She laughs again, more weakly this time. He must have said something wrong.
“If I offended you, I apologize. It was intended as a compliment—”
“No, Abel, it’s okay. I know what you meant.” Noemi glances over at him from where she lies on the bed, bashful and amused, and Abel feels an odd, disarming imbalance—as if merely looking at her throws his perceptions off-kilter. Within another instant, though, she sits up and stretches, breaking his reverie. “I’m still completely exhausted, and now I’m getting a headache. How long before the next diagnostic cycle ends?”
“Seven hours.” Since she seems to be indicating a less intimate mood would be preferred, he gets to his feet. “You can sleep through the night and rejoin me in the morning.”
“Shouldn’t you sleep, too? You’re still healing.”
He shakes his head. “I’m back to normal operations. You shouldn’t rejoin me until you are, too.”
“I thought I gave the orders around here.” But she’s only teasing him, her earlier embarrassment already fading. Noemi heads out the door toward her own cabin, her steps slow and weary. But she glances over her shoulder to say, “Good night.”
“Good night,” Abel repeats.
Her departure leaves him feeling restless. He knows she enjoyed Casablanca. Their efforts to interact as equals, even as friends, are proving successful. Repairs to the Daedelus are progressing smoothly, and they should be able to leave within another ten to twelve hours. So his mood should now be neutral to positive.
Instead he keeps replaying his memory of asking Noemi to have sex. Except in his memory, every time, he says it a little differently—a little better—and wonders if that would’ve convinced her to say yes.
Abel doesn’t experience desire in the same way humans do; Mansfield told him no man ought to be a slave to his own genitalia. But Abel can feel physical pleasure and would expect to during sex. In humans, desire comes before action; for Abel, it should be the other way around. But he’s been curious what desire would feel like.
His programming encourages him to seek out new experiences. He failed to have one tonight. That explains his disappointment, then.
No doubt.
The next morning, Abel remains hard at work in the engine room as he counts away the hours until Noemi is likely to appear. The earliest probable hour passes, as does the most probable—and then, finally, the latest Abel had calculated goes by without one word from her.
Only eight days remain before the Masada Run. Noemi remembers that. She wouldn’t let her exhaustion last night cost even one hour that might help her save the people of Genesis.
So Abel contacts her via intra-ship comms. “Noemi? It’s Abel.” An illogical thing to say, given that no one else could possibly be on board, but humans seem to find it comforting, this repetition of the obvious. “Are you awake?”
After a long pause, she replies, “Yeah. I just—I don’t feel good.”
“You’re ill?” He wonders if some of the emergency rations on board had in fact gone bad. The resulting food poisoning should not be fatal, but would cause severe nausea and fever. “Can I help you in any way? Would you like me to bring you water?”
“I think—I think maybe, yeah.”
Noemi’s voice is hoarse. Worse, she sounds unfocused, dazed. Human beings sometimes talk this way when intoxicated, though there are no inebriants on board and Noemi would be unlikely to overindulge.
Therefore, the only conclusion is that she is in fact very sick.
“I’ll be right there,” Abel promises. He hurries upward through the spiral corridor. Her room is on the second rotation, but she’s not inside. He sees her ahead of him in the corridor, just at the next visible bend—sitting on the floor in her pink T-shirt and leggings, leaning her head against the wall. He drops to his knees by her side. “Noemi, what’s happening?”
She looks at him with dull, reddened eyes. “I wanted to go to sick bay. To see if they have something for fever.”
Abel places his hand on her forehead. Her temperature is 100.7 Fahrenheit. “Tell me what you’re feeling.”
“So tired—Abel, I’m so tired—”
He scoops her into his arms to carry her to sick bay. As he does so, her oversi
ze T-shirt slips sideways again, exposing her collarbone and part of her shoulder. Her deep tan skin is now marred by thin, crooked white lines. Although Abel has never seen this before, he knows instantly what this has to be:
Cobweb.
27
NOEMI DRIFTS IN AND OUT OF REALITY. SHE TRIES TO focus her thoughts on what’s most important, but it’s hard, so hard, to do anything but lie there and simmer in her own fever heat.
“You could have called me for assistance,” Abel says. He’s laid her someplace cool and bright—sick bay. This is sick bay. She’s lying on the same bed where Esther died.
“I didn’t think I needed to.” Her feet are cold. She hates it when her feet are cold. “Not at first. Then it felt like it was too late.”
“It wasn’t too late.” Abel’s hand circles her wrist, and his thumb presses down just where the thin latticework of her veins lies closest to the skin. His skin is cool against hers—not because he’s a mech, but because she’s burning up. “Your pulse is thready. Have you been able to eat or drink?”
Has she? Noemi shakes her head, then stops when it makes the floor seem to tilt and spin. “Haven’t tried in a while.”
“You need fluids immediately.”
A moment later, a plastic straw pokes at her mouth. Noemi obediently takes a few sips, half opening her eyes to see Abel holding the pouch of… whatever this is. Something blue. It tastes sweet, too sweet, as if it were trying to trick you into drinking it.
When she lets her head fall back again, Abel says, “The medical scanners report a virus unknown to its databanks. The marks on your skin suggest, with a very high level of probability, that you’re suffering from Cobweb.”
People die of Cobweb. Harriet told Noemi that much. But it doesn’t have to be fatal, not necessarily. “I’ll get better,” she mumbles. “Just need to rest.”
“The bioscan readings are…” His voice trails off, but he seems to catch himself. “They aren’t good. And you’re unusually radioactive.”
That jolts her into a moment of clarity. “Radioactive?”
Abel touches her shoulder, which calms her. “All humans naturally emit a very low level of radiation. Yours is significantly higher than normal. Not enough to be dangerous to you or to anyone else on its own, but it’s a sign the Cobweb has drastically altered your physical condition. It’s a very strange symptom for a virus to have.”
Noemi tries to force her fever-maddened brain to think. “Maybe the radiation isn’t a symptom. Maybe it’s something we ran into on Cray.”
“If it were, then my level of radioactivity would have risen as well. It hasn’t. This disease is—it’s completely unfamiliar to me. Noemi, I don’t know how to help you, and we can’t assume you’ll recover on your own. We have to get you to a fully staffed medical facility.”
“Thought you—you had all the models’ knowledge. Tare medical models, too.”
“I do. But from thirty years ago, when I was stranded. Cobweb hadn’t yet appeared then. So I have no information on optimal treatment or likely prognosis.” Abel sounds like he’s mad at the whole galaxy for containing even one piece of information he lacks.
“Just try your best.”
He shakes his head. “That’s not good enough.”
Abel just admitted his best might not be good enough? Under any other circumstances, Noemi would’ve teased him like crazy for that: the arrogant Model One A of the Mansfield Cybernetics line admitting he has limits. Now, though, she has to keep him from doing something so logical it’s idiotic. “What else can we do? On Cray or Kismet—we’ll be found by the Queen and Charlie. And no one on Genesis can help me.” Nobody there will have treated Cobweb either, and she can’t bring some terrible plague back to her world.
“Exactly. So we’ll go back through the Cray system on our way to Stronghold.”
Stronghold? It’s the most populated world on the Loop save for Earth itself, a cold, forbidding world heavy with ores. Stronghold is as different from Genesis as it is possible for any world to be. Worse, it’s still tightly bound to Earth, still completely loyal… so far as she knows. But that’s far enough. “Abel, no. It’s going to take too long.”
“We still have eight days. That gives us time to get to Stronghold.”
“Barely. And we could get caught. It’s too dangerous.”
“I can disguise the ship, check in with Stronghold’s computer networks to see whether our images have been distributed there. If so, I can probably erase them in advance.”
“Probably isn’t good enough.”
He’s quiet for a few seconds, enough that she thinks the discussion is over. But just as she begins to drift in the fever again, he says, “You said you accepted me as your equal. I’m not under your authority any longer. So I get to vote, too, don’t I? And I vote for taking you to a doctor immediately.”
Then the vote’s a tie, and nobody wins. But as Noemi begins to say so, chills begin shivering their way up her body. Her bones ache as if she were being wrung out like a washcloth. She never, never wants to feel so cold again.
Noemi’s willing to die to save Genesis. But she never intended to throw her life away without meaning. If she dies out here, because of this, she dies for no reason.
She swallows hard and nods. “Stronghold.”
Noemi remembers their departure through the Blind Gate as hardly more than a blur of slowly spinning asteroids flecked across the brightly colored wisps of the nebula. When the light starts doing that strange bendy thing, she just closes her eyes.
She lies in sick bay, covered in silvery blankets. Before he left her to pilot the ship, Abel turned down the lights in the hopes Noemi could get some more sleep. She managed a catnap, but now she can only lie on the medical bed, gazing around the room in weary confusion. How can she possibly be so far from home? How is any of this actually happening? Maybe the virus is playing tricks on her, and in reality she’s back on Genesis, suffering from some totally normal illness.
But she can’t convince herself this is a dream, because her weak, aching body tells her this is all too real. And through the one oval sick bay window, she sees constellations of unfamiliar stars.
“Noemi?” Abel walks into the darkened sick bay, his face illuminated mostly by the glowing readings above her biobed. How long has it been since the leap through the Blind Gate? She drifted off for a while, but can’t tell whether she was out for a few minutes or a day. “We’ll be in Stronghold orbit within the hour.” Closer to the latter then, she realizes, because she’s missed another entire Gate leap.
“Okay.” Will she be able to walk off the ship herself, or will Abel have to carry her?
“Noemi?” Abel’s leaning over her, his thumb brushing her sweat-damp hair from her forehead. Did she drift off again? “I’ve given you drugs that ought to reduce fever. I’m not sure whether they’re contraindicated for Cobweb, but—something needed to be done.”
“It’s okay.” Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Noemi doesn’t particularly care at the moment. There’s no way the drug could make her feel worse than she already does. The rest is irrelevant.
“We’re landing on Stronghold now.”
Something seems very wrong with that. “But—why aren’t you flying the ship?”
“Stronghold brings in nearly all incoming ships via tractor beam, even during mass migration waves.”
“Mass migration?” The fever must be ebbing somewhat; Noemi can focus her mind better now. “What do you mean?”
Abel answers her by activating a small screen on the wall, which shows a smaller version of what they’d have seen on the bridge—the planet Stronghold.
Its gray, crater-scarred surface makes it look more like a lifeless moon than a habitable world. The thin atmosphere is breathable, but only just, and the black seas that blot the surface are what Stronghold has instead of oceans. Thick, silvery icecaps coat the poles down nearly to what would, on a warmer world, be called the tropics. Factories and mines cover the equator w
ith metal as if they were plates of armor. Even from orbit, she can see how much industrial smoke is being belched out.
“They’re using this world up, too,” she murmurs, pushing herself up on her elbows. “Poisoning it.”
“Not in this case.” Abel zooms in on the view, showing her more of the factories. “The planet has to be warmer before it can sustain more than three hundred million humans—very nearly the current population. So they’re intentionally releasing greenhouse gases as part of an effort to terraform Stronghold into a more habitable world.”
Noemi had never considered that before, that one world’s poison might be another’s salvation.
Stronghold looks as terrifying as any world possibly could, and yet it’s also her best chance of getting well. Going on with her mission. Saving Genesis.
Seven days. The fever can’t rob her of this knowledge, this deadline that eats at her every second. Seven days.
The ring around the planet confuses her at first—in school, nobody ever taught them that Stronghold had a ring. Her eyes widen as she recognizes what she’s actually seeing: a gigantic swarm of ships, mostly large industrial freighters, gathered like chickens at feed—each one of which must carry dozens if not hundreds of humans. This fleet dwarfs the cluster of ships they saw at Kismet; even more ominous, these ships show none of the Vagabonds’ imagination and spirit. No brilliant paint designs brighten the hulls of these square metal ships. They float in formations as rigid and regular as honeycombs, waiting and watching for the decision that will make the difference between life and death for everyone on board.
Then the screen shimmers into the planetary greeting. Triumphal music begins to play as a prerecorded image superimposes itself over the star field: Two black flags, each with a thin silver stripe down the middle, flutter on either side of an enormous granite building with massive columns in front.
“This is Stronghold,” says an announcer with a deep, purposeful voice. “Here, we mine the metals and minerals Earth and the other colony worlds need to survive. We train to serve in Earth’s armies with dignity and courage. And we work to reshape our planet into humanity’s next home. Someday our planet will stand at the center of the galaxy. Are you strong enough to stand with us?”