We Have Fed Our Sea

10

When the mind gave up and the mathematics became a blur, there was work for Maclaren’s hands. Sverdlov, and Ryerson under him, did the machine-tool jobs; Nakamura’s small fingers showed such delicacy that he was set to drawing wire and polishing control-ring surfaces. Maclaren was left with the least skilled assignment, least urgent because he was always far ahead of the consumption of his product: melting, separating, and re-alloying the fused salvage from ion accelerators and transceiver web.

But it was tricky in null-gee. There could not be any significant spin on the ship or assembly, out on the lattice, it would have become too complicated for so small a gang of workers. Coriolis force would have created serious problems even for the inboard jobs. On the other hand, weightless melt had foul habits. Maclaren’s left arm was still bandaged, the burn on his forehead still a crimson gouge.

It didn’t seem to matter. When he looked in a mirror, he hardly recognized his face. There hadn’t been much physical change yet, but the expression was a stranger’s. And his life had narrowed to these past weeks, behind them lay only a dream. In moments when there was nothing else to do he might still play a quick chess game with Sverdlov, argue the merits of No versus Kabuki with Nakamura, or shock young Ryerson by a well-chosen dirty limerick. But thinking back, he saw how such times had become more and more sparse. He had quit trying to make iron rations palatable, when his turn in the galley came up; he had not sung a ballad for hundreds of the Cross’ black-sun years. He shaved by the clock and hung onto fastidiousness of dress as pure ritual, the way Nakamura contemplated his paradoxes or Ryerson quoted his Bible or Sverdlov thumbed through his nude photographs of past mistresses. It was a way of telling yourself, I am still alive.

There came a moment when Maclaren asked what he was doing other than going through the motions of survival. That was a bad question.

“You see,” he told his mirror twin, “it suggests a further inquiry: Why? And that’s the problem we’ve been dodging all our mutual days.”

He stowed his electric razor, adjusted his tunic, and pushed out of the tiny bathroom. The living section was deserted, as it had been most of the time. Not only were they all too busy to sit around, but it was too narrow.

Outside its wall, he moved through the comfort of his instruments. He admitted frankly that his project of learning as much as possible of the star was three-quarters selfish. It was not really very probable that exact knowledge of its atmospheric composition would be of any use to their escape. But it offered him a chance, for minutes at a time, to forget where he was. Of course, he did not admit the fact to anyone but himself. And he wondered a little what reticences the other men had.

This time he was not alone. Nakamura hovered at an observation port. The pilot’s body was outlined with unwavering diamond stars. But as the dead sun swung by, Maclaren saw him grow tense and bring a hand toward his eyes, as if to cover them.

He drifted soundlessly behind Nakamura. “Boo,” he said.

The other whirled around in air, gasping. As the thresh of arms and legs died away, Maclaren looked upon terror.

“I’m sorry!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t think I’d startle you.”

“I… it is nothing.” Nakamura’s brown gaze held some obscure beggary. “I should not have — It is nothing.”

“Did you want anything of me?” Maclaren offered one of his last cigarettes. Nakamura accepted it blindly, without even saying thanks. Something is very wrong with this lad, thought Maclaren. Fear drained in through the glittering viewport. And he’s the only pilot we’ve got.

“No. I had… I was resting a few moments. One cannot do precision work when… tired… yes-s-s.” Nakamura’s hunger-gaunted cheeks caved in with the violence of his sucking on the tobacco. A little crown of sweat-beads danced around his head.

“Oh, you’re not bothering me.” Maclaren crossed his legs and leaned back on the air. “As a matter of fact, I’m glad of your company. I need someone to talk with.”

Nakamura laughed his meaningless laugh. “We should look to you for help, rather than you to us,” he said. “You are the least changed of us all.”

“Oh? I thought I was the most affected. Sverdlov hankers for his women and his alcohol and his politics. Ryerson wants back to his shiny new wife and his shiny new planet. You’re the local rock of ages. But me—” Maclaren shrugged. “I’ve nothing to anchor me.”

“You have grown quieter, yes.” The cigarette in Nakamura’s hand quivered a little, but his words came steadily now.

“I have begun to wonder about things.” Maclaren scowled at the black sun. By treating it as a scientific problem, he had held at arm’s length the obsession he had seen eating at Ryerson — who grew silent and large-eyed and reverted to the iron religion he had once been shaking off — and at Sverdlov, who waxed bitterly profane. So far, Maclaren had not begun thinking of the star as a half-alive malignancy. But it would be all too easy to start.

“One does, sooner or later.” Nakamura’s tone held no great interest. He was still wrapped up in his private horror, and that was what Maclaren wanted to get him out of.

“But I don’t wonder efficiently. I find myself going blank, when all I’m really doing is routine stuff and I could just as well be thinking at my problems.”

“Thought is a technique, to be learned,” said Nakamura, “just as the uses of the body—” He broke off. “I have no right to teach. I have failed my own masters.”

“I’d say you were doing very well. I’ve envied you your faith. You have an answer.”

“Zen does not offer any cut-and-dried answers to problems. In fact, it tries to avoid all theory. No human system can comprehend the infinite real universe.”

“I know.”

“And that is my failure,” whispered Nakamura. “I look for an explanation. I do not want merely to be. No, that is not enough… out here, I find that I want to be justified.”

Maclaren stared into the cruelty of heaven. “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “I’m scared spitless.”

“What? But I thought—”

“Oh, I have enough flip retorts to camouflage it. But I’m as much afraid to die, I’m struggling as frantically and with as little dignity, as any trapped rat. And I’m slowly coming to see why, too. It’s because I haven’t got anything but my own life — my own minute meaningless life of much learning and no understanding, much doing and no accomplishing, many acquaintances and no friends — it shouldn’t be worth the trouble of salvaging, should it? And yet I’m unable to see any more in the entire universe than just that: a lot of scurrying small accidents of organic chemistry, on a lot of flyspeck planets. If things made even a little sense, if I could see there was anything at all more important than this bunch of mucous membranes labeled Terangi Maclaren… why, then there’d be no reason to fear my own termination. The things that mattered would go on.”

Nakamura smoked in silence for a while. Maclaren finished his own cigarette in quick nervous puffs, fought temptation, swore to himself and lit another.

“I didn’t mean to turn you into a weeping post,” he said. And he thought: The hell I didn’t. I fed you your psychological medicine right on schedule. Though perhaps I did make the dose larger than planned.

“I am unworthy,” said Nakamura. “But it is an honor.”

He stared outward, side by side with the other man. “I try to reassure myself with the thought that there must be beings more highly developed than we,” he said.

“Are you sure?” answered Maclaren, welcoming the chance to be impersonal. “We’ve never found any that were even comparable to us. In the brains department, at least. I’ll admit the Van Mannen’s abos are more beautiful, and the Old Thothians more reliable and sweet tempered.”

“How much do we know of the galaxy?”

“Um-m-m… yes.”

“I have lived in the hope of encountering a truly great race. Even if they are not like gods — they will have their own wise men. They will not look at the world just as we do. From each other, two such peoples could learn the unimaginable, just as the high epochs of Earth’s history came when different peoples interflowed. Yes-s-s. But this would be so much more, because the difference is greater. Less conflict. What reason would there be for it? And more to offer, a billion years of separate experience as life forms.”

“I can tell you this much,” said Maclaren, “the Protectorate would not like it. Our present civilization couldn’t survive such a transfusion of ideas.”

“Is our civilization anything so great?” asked Nakamura with an unwonted scornfulness.

“No. I suppose not.”

“We have a number of technical tricks. Doubtless we could learn more from such aliens as I am thinking of. But what we would really learn that mattered — for this era of human history lacks one — would be a philosophy.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in philosophies.”

“I used a wrong word. I meant a do — a way. A way of. . an attitude? That is what life is for, that is your ‘Why’ — it is not a mechanical cause-and-effect thing, it is the spirit in which we live.”

Nakamura laughed again. “But hear the child correcting the master! I, who cannot even follow the known precepts of Zen, ask for help from the unknown! Were it offered me, I would doubtless crawl into the nearest worm-hole.”

And suddenly the horror flared up again. He grabbed Maclaren’s arm. It sent them both twisting around, so that their outraged senses of balance made the stars whirl in their skulls. Maclaren felt Nakamura’s grip like ice on his bare skin.

“I am afraid!” choked the pilot. “Help me! I am afraid!”

They regained their floating positions. Nakamura let go and took a fresh cigarette with shaking fingers. The silence grew thick.

Maclaren said at last, not looking toward the Saraian: “Why not tell me the reason? It might relieve you a bit.”

Nakamura drew a breath. “I have always been afraid of space,” he said. “And yet called to it also. Can you understand?”

“Yes. I think I know.”

“It has—” Nakamura giggled. “Unsettled me. All my life. First, as a child I was taken from my home on Earth, across space. And now, of course, I can never come back.”

“I have some pull in the Citadel. A visa could be arranged.”

“You are very kind. I am not sure whether it would help. Kyoto cannot be as I remember it. If it has not changed, surely I have, yes-s-s? But please let me continue. After a few years on Sarai, there was a meteor fall which killed all my family except my brother. A stone from space, do you see? We did not think of it that way, then. The monastery raised us. We got scholarships to an astronautical academy. We made a voyage together as cadets. Have you heard of the Firdawzi disaster?”

“No, I’m afraid not.” Maclaren poured smoke from his mouth, as a veil against the cosmos.

“Capella is a GO star like Sol, but a giant. The Firdawzi had been long at the innermost planet of the system, a remote-controlled survey trip. The radiations caused a metal fatigue. No one suspected. On our cruise, the ship suddenly failed. The pilot barely got us into an orbit, after we had fallen a long way toward Capella. There we must wait until rescue came. Many died from the heat. My brother was one of them.”

Stillness hummed.

“I see,” said Maclaren at last.

“Since then I have been afraid of space. It rises into my consciousness from time to time.” Maclaren stole a glance at Nakamura. The little man was lotus-postured in midair, save that he stared at his hands and they twisted together. Wretchedness overrode his voice. “And yet I could not stop my work either. Because out in space I often seem to come closer to oneness… that which we all seek, what you have called understanding. But here, caught in this orbit about this star, the oneness is gone and the fear has grown and grown until I am afraid I will have to scream.”

“It might help,” said Maclaren.

Nakamura looked up. He tried to smile. “What do you think?” he asked.

Maclaren blew a meditative cloud of smoke. Now he would have to pick his words with care — and no background or training in the giving of succor-or lose the only man who could pull this ship free. Or lose Nakamura: that aspect of it seemed, all at once, more important.

“I wonder,” Maclaren murmured, “even in an absolutely free society, if any such thing could exist — I wonder if every man isn’t afraid of his bride.”

“What?” Nakamura’s lids snapped apart in startlement.

“And needs her at the same time,” said Maclaren. “I might even extend it beyond sex. Perhaps fear is a necessary part of anything that matters. Could Bach have loved his God so magnificently without being inwardly afraid of Him? I don’t know.”

He stubbed out his cigarette. “I suggest you meditate upon this,” he said lightly. “And on the further fact, which may be a little too obvious for you to have seen, that this is not Capella.”

Then he waited.

Nakamura made a gesture with his body. Only afterward, thinking about it, did Maclaren realize it was a free-fall prostration. “Thank you,” he said.

“I should thank you,” said Maclaren, quite honestly. “You gave me a leg up too, y’ know.”

Nakamura departed for the machine shop.

Maclaren hung at the viewport a while longer. The rasp of a pocket lighter brought his head around.

Chang Sverdlov entered from the living section. The cigar in his mouth was held at a somehow resentful angle.

“Well,” said Maclaren. “How long were you listening?”

“Long enough,” grunted the engineer.

He blew cheap, atrocious smoke until his pocked face was lost in it. “So,” he asked, “aren’t you going to get mad at me?”

“If it serves a purpose,” said Maclaren.

“Uh!” Sverdlov fumed away for a minute longer. “Maybe I had that coming,” he said.

“Quite probably. But how are the repairs progressing outside?”

“All right. Look here,” Sverdlov blurted, “do me a favor, will you? If you can. Don’t admit to Ryerson, or me, that you’re human — that you’re just as scared and confused as the rest of us. Don’t admit it to Nakamura, even. You didn’t, you know so far… not really. We need a, a, a cocky dude of a born-and-bred technic — to get us through!”

He whirled back into the quarters. Maclaren heard him dive, almost fleeing, aft along the shaftway.