Survey Ship

CHAPTER TWELVE

Teague thrust Fontana, still struggling, into her cubicle. He said dryly, “Get that hypo ready, Moira.”

Fontana had fallen heavily to the floor. She stirred slightly, sat up. Her voice was very calm.

“I don’t need it, Teague. I won’t make any more trouble, I promise you.”

Teague hesitated. Then he said in a hard voice, “We have trouble enough with Ching. I think we should knock you out and make sure you won’t give us any more problems.”

“No,” Fontana said, and Moira interrupted him.

“She’s right, Teague. Peake said himself that she’s the only one qualified to help him if he needs help. She can’t help him if she’s doped up. Fontana, do you want me to stay with you? Do you need someone to talk to?”

“No. Really. But I think I — I do need to be alone a while.”

Teague still hesitated, but finally he put the hypo away. He said, “All right. But don’t let yourself get into that state again. If you need somebody, just yell. One of us will be here.” Roughly, he put his arms around her and hugged her hard. “Look, don’t worry about it. Peake understands how upset we all are over this. Try and eat something, Fontana.”

“All right. Leave me the tray,” Fontana said, and when the cubicle door had closed behind them, she sighed, reached for the tray and put a forkful of food — cold now — into her mouth.

In spite of her agitation, she felt deeply moved. In the midst of his own agitation over Ching, he had taken the time to try and comfort her. Yes, he had mistaken the source of her distress, but she felt warmed by his concern.

Yet, after all, why should he not be concerned? They had been friends since the age of five, had briefly been lovers. Teague was not the kind of person to desert an old lover simply because he loved someone else.

They are all my friends, she thought, I owe it to them to die with as much dignity as they do, and not make it harder for us all to die.

And then — it was like a blinding light — she thought, But we are all going to die sometime anyhow. And people have always died. More stupidly than this, more uselessly than this. Before there were spaceships or Academies, there was always the prowling sabre-tooth tiger outside the cave. The very act of being born presupposes death.

She still felt all the unexpressed rage against the Academy, that could use them this way and fling them out into space like spores of their dying planet. For the planet was dying, or they would not have needed the Academy at all. All of them, all of the students in the Academy, had been exempted for twelve years from all of humanity’s lesser and grosser problems, pampered, protected, made into the cream of the cream of the cream of the human race; and we do not suffer from wars, or from famines, or from politics, or from energy shortages, the struggle to survive, family crises, or social upheavals. None of us has ever had any of mankind’s lesser problems; because we were being saved for the greatest of their major ones; the very survival of the human race itself. And we cannot expect to live forever in the pampered womb of the Academy. We are struggling with the pains of birth, that is all. And the first of the pains of birth, the first problem of those driven out of our Eden, is the problem of death. I had never come face to face with death before; that is all. I had never known that one day I must certainly die.

But there is no need to die before we must, she thought. And part of my own struggle to live is to help Ching live; and so I must really be ready to assist Peake at whatever he has to do.

Firmly she sat up, put her fork into the cold and unappetizing food, and began, steadily, to eat it. Afterward she would go and shower and rest and be ready for Peake when — or if — he needed her.

She could even tolerate not knowing whether it would be when, or if. Humanity had always lived with uncertainties like that. She had simply been exempted from them a little longer than most people, that was all. But someday even the most protected children had to grow up.

Teague turned away from Fontana’s door, and shoved his way, not into his own cubicle, but into Ching’s deserted one. It was the only way in which he could be close to her. There was the bunk, the safety net still hanging loose from one edge; the net behind which, clipped together, they had made love. It seemed that he could almost- feel her delicate body against his, the feel of her small breasts in his hands. He had said something about the perfection of her body, and with that curious mixture of sophistication and naivete, she had laughed and said she couldn’t claim any credit for it, it was all due to genetic tinkering anyway, but she was grateful she had been given that kind of perfection; at least she wasn’t frigid or anything imperfect like that! They had laughed over that as if it were really funny.

Teague felt as if he would weep again, that guilt would destroy him. His injured hand throbbed, and he almost welcomed evidence of sharing her suffering. If he had not badgered her about her fear of free-fall, if he had not urged her, she would not have felt so compelled to overcome it, would not have been led into those damnable, execrable, experiments in the gym.

She trusted me, she trusted me, she said she knew I would never Jet her get hurt….

Forcibly wrenching his mind away from guilt, he sat down and ate his tray of cold food. Then, because Teague was the kind of person who would always take refuge in action when he was troubled, he busied himself around the cubicle, taking some discarded disposable clothes out to the disposer chute with his tray and eating utensils, returning to straighten away the mild disorder of the room. Lying on the small desk-shelf, meticulously clipped down for safety in free-fall, was some music which Ching had been reading or studying; a copy of the Ave Verum they had been singing, and, beneath it, a few lines hand-scribbled, not a neat computer printout. Blinking, Teague recognized the page of his string quartet that he had crumpled and been ready to put into the disposer.

It seemed so meaningless now, small and pointless, when he had been so proud of it. It wasn’t music, not in the sense that Bach was music, it wasn’t important with Ching lying near death, perhaps already dead — no, Teague clung to the knowledge that Peake would tell him if there had been any serious change.

He stared at the melody line, hearing it sung in Ching’s small sweet voice. She had treasured it, then, she had kept it here so that he would not, in a fit of depression, destroy it.

And suddenly Teague felt the weight of guilt slip from his heart. He had not forced Ching to try the experiment which had led to her accident; she had been eager to be free of the paralyzing fear and incapacity, eager to function in free-fall as well as he did, and the others. It was part of her desire to do everything she did as well as it could possibly be done, part of the character which had made her a computer expert. His guilt was pointless. In the face of the death which might face them all if Ching did not recover, everything was pointless, perhaps.

And yet he looked at his quartet with new, cherishing eyes. Ching had thought it good, worth preserving. Perhaps the quartet was pointless, too, as pointless as his guilt.

But it is as important, and as unimportant, as anything else. And as he smoothed out the sheets, he drew a stylus from his pocket and corrected a minor flaw in the music. He saw that Ching had penciled in another small correction. And he knew that if they lived through another day, and Ching did not die, he would show the quartet to Peake, who was undeniably the best musician among them, and ask for his opinion and his help. And some day, if they lived, all of them would play it together. That day might never come, but he was going to prepare for it, anyhow.

He curled up his big body into the bunk where he and Ching had made love, and began to scribble on the music paper. He would finish it, for Ching, and for their love, and for himself. And for all of them. Because, if he was important to them, his music was important too, the best of himself to be shared with them all.

Moira found that she was not hungry; but with the discipline of years, she forced herself to eat. Ravi had chosen foods for her that he knew she liked, and she spared him a grateful thought.

She thought how wretchedly ironic it was that Ching, the most perfect among them, the G-N, the self-sufficient, should be the one to fail them.

If she dies, she thought, and quailed from the thought. She was surprised at her own reaction. As recently as the day before they left Earth, she would have thought Ching was the one who would be most readily expendable, the G-N, the one nobody really liked. She herself had admired Ching, but never really liked her; now she faced the fact that she had envied Ching. Envied her her sharp intelligence, the special High-IQ genes of the G-N; and even more, envied her the perfect self-sufficiency. Envied that Ching had not seemed to need men, whereas she herself, Moira, had reached out, always, for approval, wanting to see herself mirrored in other eyes. Men’s eyes. Feeling isolated by the Wild Talent, the ESP which had made her feel like a freak, she had turned to sex as some people turn to art, or music, or other forms of self-expression; she had enjoyed the appreciation men gave her body, enjoyed reducing the proudest men to her physical slaves. Yet, she realized miserably, although she had given her body to many men, she had never been able to give to any man the happiness she had seen in Teague’s face when Ching snuggled on his lap in the music room.

And now Ching was dying, and Teague had probably got it into his head that it was his fault. Damn it, no, it wasn’t his fault, it was the fault of the damned DeMags; and, she thought, my fault too. I’m supposed to be so good with machinery, and I couldn’t even find it. And I didn’t even trust my ESP enough to tell everybody in no uncertain terms: Stay out of the gym — the trouble isn’t over yet.

Why, she wondered, had she not warned anyone?

And then, humiliated, she knew, If she had demanded, stormed, said that her ESP was giving her severe warnings of more trouble, she would have had to admit that she was a freak, different, not the happy, sexy, carefree Moira they all liked and admired. She would have had, for once, to admit her own difference, her own isolation, that she was not perfectly independent and self-sufficient after all, but a cringing child in the grip of something she, for all her intelligence and all her talent, could not understand.

I was willing to let somebody be killed, rather than admit I was a/raid of my own ESP! If Ching dies, how can I ever live with that?

And here I am again, thinking only of myself and not of Ching.

She realized that she had gone to ail kinds of lengths to avoid admitting this to herself. She had tried to validate herself by making Ravi her slave, then showing her power over him by rejecting his love. And, staring at the floor, she knew that this, at least, she had the power to put right even if they all died.

If I could offer myself to Peake, who doesn’t want me, I can offer myself to Ravi, who wants me in a way that frightens me to think about. I can’t do anything to help Ching, just now. I couldn’t do anything for Peake except make him uncomfortable; and if I go to Teague he would think, and quite rightly too, that I was trying to take a mean advantage of Ching while she’s hurt. The one person I can make happier just now is Ravi.

She put her plate in the disposer and stole quietly toward Ravi’s door.

Ravi had turned the DeMags down as low as he could, and curled up cross-legged, in midair, letting his mind go free in meditation. Yet it stayed fiercely locked to his body, without the reassuring freedom of the meditative state.

It was likely, he thought, that they were all going to die. It did not seem to matter. But he felt sick with regret at the waste. So much they might have done. The whole Cosmos waiting out there to be seen and explored, and they would die before they even left the Solar System.

But it seemed that as he floated there, he was a part of the whole Ship, of the whole crew, suffering Peake’s shaken lack of confidence, Fontana’s surging terror of death, Teague’s guilt… it even seemed that he shared Ching’s lifelessness. He wished fiercely that he had been taught to pray. There Is no human help for this kind of crisis. Therefore we need God,

And then he wondered, sharply; wasn’t it demeaning God, to call on the forces of the Deity for help in purely mundane problems? If God was ineffable, he could not be a kind of super-Mommy, contorting cries and tears and fears. God, if there was a God at all, and Ravi knew he could not admit any such possibility, God had to be something above and beyond all human problems, something not to be questioned about Its divine ways, but accepted, endured, shared. God was all of them together, the crew, the Ship, the stars, everything. And how did he dare to think that he alone suffered for some spiritual awareness? It was the same problem every one of them had; how to deal with the terrifying fact that every human being, every atom of material matter, is forever alone, shut up inside the confines of his own thought processes. Everyone needed that awareness of NOT being alone, and when for a moment they were conscious of the truth, that every atom in the great universe needed every other atom, not to DO anything, but simply to BE, then they had realized God. No matter what they called it.

And then he raised his eyes and found that God, whom for the moment he knew in Moira, was beside him, tears raining down her face, holding out her arms.

“Oh, Ravi, Ravi, I need you, I love you so,” she whispered, and Ravi knew in that instant he too was God for her.

Peake consulted the chronometer for, it seemed, the fifth or sixth time in an hour. He bent to check Ching’s vital signs again; pinched a fold of muscle on her upper arm, brutally. The response was fainter this time, none of the sharp flinching she had shown at first. There was no point putting it off. She was worse. Her response to painful stimuli was diminishing; the last real sign of brain activity. She breathed, her heart beat, her blood moved and was deoxygenated and reoxygenated in her veins, the superb physical organism was there. But where was the real Ching?

He was alone, on this Ship, alone with a crew of hostile strangers, and at this moment they needed him, he was the only one who might be able to save Ching. And to save Ching was to save them all, for Ching was their one hope of repairing the computer, and with it the faulty DeMag units, the problems with navigation, the Ship itself.

So he had no choice but to operate. The question he had asked himself before came back now, with sickening force.

If it had been Jimson, could I have done it? Will I be less squeamish because it is Ching?

And suddenly, touching Ching’s cold foot with careful surgeon’s fingers, he knew that the answer was yes. He would have operated on Jimson, if the alternative was death; the reason Jimson was not on their crew was because the powers of the Academy had known that Jimson, buried in self-distrust of the thing he had become, would not have been willing to do the same for him.

He had never been alone. Or rather, all during the years with Jimson he had been alone without knowing it; and now he would never be alone again. He had not a single lover, but five of them. It did not matter whether or not he ever managed to bring himself to have sex with any or all of them, though he supposed that some day, now that he was aware of how deeply he was bound to them, that would happen too, in the proper time. But when and if it did, that was irrelevant. The important thing was that for now it was his responsibility to do the best he could for Ching, and for them all. There was no room for a consensus decision now; he could not refuse now to take that responsibility upon himself.

He touched a button to the intercom.

“Fontana and Teague,” he said into it, “I need you here. Ching isn’t responding, and we need to decide what to do.”