Damocles (22 page)

Jefferson carried the three stone fetishes that the Galen miners carried as protection against danger. Prader, she knew, always wore a piece of red silk somewhere on her body, going so far as to weave it around the edge of her sleep sack during stasis. Wagner
had a small ebony box, the contents of which were unknown to anyone else on board. Cho had a series of tattooed symbols scattered across his body, adding to them with every deep-space trip he made. He never told her the meanings of them but she would catch him touching one or the other as different problems arose on voyages. He would even place her hands on some of them when they made love, the sight of her hand on his markings moving him in ways she never asked him to explain. And she, of course, wore the dented brass locket she told anyone who asked was broken and could not be opened. All the deep-space crews she’d worked with knew that was a lie, and to date none had called her on it.

How could she tell this to Loul? How could she reconcile the technology the Dideto found so intriguing, so revolutionary, with the inexplicable need to cling to talismans and charms? They had propelled themselves through billions of miles of empty space using a recombinant crystal that in all probability should have blown them to stardust months before. They had Earther medical advances that clearly outstripped the Dideto by decades if not centuries, so how could it be that not one of the five crew members could bring themselves to answer the simple question of whether or not more of their kind were coming?

That answer was that no Earther who had ever ventured past the first ring of terraforming would ever, even under pain of death, break the immutable law of the dark side. When the first voyagers had gone out, before the terraforming ring had even been imagined, it was common practice for shuttles—really just primitive ejection pods at the time—to be dropped onto surfaces while the main ship remained in orbit around the body. Communication with those on the surface was often broken up by radiation and the distance from surface to ship. The main ship
would go “dark side,” go to the other side of the space body, leaving those on the surface cut off, alone.

In those early years, more people didn’t survive the missions than did, and those that did let it be known that while the main ship was on the dark side, it was never to be mentioned. Psychologically, it proved too easy for the isolation and possibility of being stranded to break even the most vetted astronauts, and more than one surface walker had cracked the helmet, taking his or her own life rather than face the terror of the main ship not returning. And so, decades later and billions of miles deeper into space, that psychological safeguard had taken on the profundity of scripture. When you were on the surface and your ship was dark side, nobody uttered a word of its absence. The names of the absent crewmembers were as good as forgotten, and no deep-space traveler would ever consider breaking this code for any reason.

Meg hadn’t realized how deeply ingrained this understanding was in her and the rest of the crew. It had never been tested. People in the deep-space colonies knew the law as well any traveler to their port and thus nobody ever demanded the rule be broken. Now, all the understood rules of Earthers and the colonies and the terraforming rings were gone. Nothing could be assumed anymore, and the five of them were facing a breakdown in communication that could jeopardize all of their lives because Meg couldn’t be certain that even thinking the name of the woman remaining in the ship outside the Didet atmosphere wouldn’t bring catastrophe upon all of them.

Part of her screamed that it was stupid. It was a superstition. Nothing she could say or do could in any way affect the fate of the
Damocles
. The capricious crystal worked on its own logic, and it certainly wouldn’t be words that made it malfunction, especially words spoken thousands of miles away on the surface
of a planet. But staring into the gray, three-lidded eyes of this stranger from another life stream so different from her own and yet so similar, logic didn’t hold much sway. She couldn’t even ask Cho or the other crew members what she should do. It was That Thing That Would Not Be Spoken Of. Period. Until That Person Who Could Not Be Named made contact, the terror of the dark side held them all in its grip.

She wondered if she should try to teach Loul the word for
crazy
because that’s how she felt. Crazy and helpless to fight it. Unwilling to fight it. But that didn’t mean she had to let it tear apart her bond with Loul. She took his hand in both of hers. He started to pull it away but she wrapped her fingers around his thick wrist. They both knew he was more than strong enough to break her grasp and she felt heartened that he didn’t. He didn’t cling to her hand, though; he just let her hold it.

“Loul.” Pulling one hand free she moved over the screen. “Trust Meg.” He moved his free hand over the screen but she pushed it away, pushing one button repeatedly. “Need/want. Need/want. Need/want.” She spoke again. “Trust Meg.”

“Meg talk Loul. Questions. Questions Meg talk Loul.”

Biting her lip in frustration, Meg pressed Loul’s hands down through the light screen, holding them against the table, and stared at the language prompts illuminating their intermingled hands. She flicked off the screen and brought her hands together between his. Maybe she could tell him without telling him. Cupping her hands as he had earlier, she looked at him as she spoke. “Meg no talk. Meg no questions.”

She heard his teeth grind together and then stop as she put her hands outside of his, still curved as if cupping a much larger bowl. “Later Meg talk. Loul ask. Meg answer.”

He stared at her hands, the pitch of his thrum dropping in intensity. When he spoke she could see he didn’t use the broken
half-language they’d been using. He spoke in his real language, not bothering or maybe not able to think in the half-speak they’d built. Meg activated the screen once more and saw the program filtering through his words, recognizing several that had come up in their discussions of food and water. When she saw the translator put together the meaning of his question, she leaned forward, pressing her forehead to his clenched fists.

“Yes, Loul, yes. Didet is safe. Didet is safe. Earthers are no danger.”

He pulled back his hands, and she sat up, her shoulders slumped. She suddenly felt exhausted, the cuts and scrapes and bruises of their mud fights making themselves known all over her body. She wanted to sleep and not dream for about a month or two. Mostly she wanted Loul to believe her and free her of this burden of secrecy.

He gripped the sides of the table, staring at the light screen then glancing up at her. He looked at the ship and the crews and the archiving cameras. He looked at Mamu’s lenses and the line of wet clothes Jefferson had hung out to dry. His thrum went silent for several long seconds and Meg thought she might scream if he didn’t give her his answer soon. Finally his thrum returned, low and steady. His hand hovered over the light screen but he put it back down, choosing instead to look up at her, his inner eyelid back out of sight. He considered her a moment and then spoke.

“Yes. Loul trust Meg. Okay.”

What could he do? It was like in the game Circle when you drew that duel block and you had no arsenal. All you could do was go all in, put all your magic in the pot and in the hold of the Great Sail and hope you made it across. Hark hated it when Loul used that strategy; he told him it was the same as cheating, that it wasn’t a strategy at all but the kind of stupid blundering that ruined the game for everyone. He usually said these things because he was angry that nine out of ten times the strategy worked for Loul and he wound up on the Mountain of Power before anyone else. What could he do? He was the kind of guy who, when face-to-face with an alien species that he knew was lying to him, thought about a kid’s game he was too old to still be playing.

Meg’s face took on yet another new expression. It seemed the long bony planes of their faces had no end to the permutations they could bend into. She folded up her body too, bringing her skinny knees up to her chest, somehow wedging them in between her chest and the table, wrapping her arms around them and resting her chin where her forearms piled up. She looked small enough to shoot through a pom-cannon, and he noticed that the thickness of both of her forearms pressed together still
didn’t match the thickness of one of his. Her fingers draped like a fringe over the bend of her arms.

He just looked at her and let her watch him. Everything was different now. The official crews, those black-clad work teams the Urfers had refused to acknowledge, Loul knew the truth about them now. All his life he’d watched the official crews working at accident sites, fires, science labs—anywhere the news crews were, the black-clad crews worked with that quick, crisp efficiency he and everyone around him so admired. Videos of those professionals had been shown in schools to encourage all of them to work harder, study harder, strive to be better. He’d even dreamed, way back in the day when he’d written his special alien-invasion preparation report for the Telemetry Administration, of being a member of one of those crews, of donning an expensive black overshirt and manning the extra-atmosphere satellite control.

Now? Now he saw how they really worked. Maybe this site was an exception but Loul doubted it. Loul doubted everything now. What happened here probably happened everywhere, every day, every time the news crews reported from a site. There were probably hundreds of work teams all over the world just doing their job every day, showing up, getting it done until, for whatever reason, what they were doing became newsworthy and just like that the official crews moved into place. Cameras got footage of handsome, well-dressed men and women with shiny equipment and determined, serious faces.

And why? Because people like him and Kik and Olum didn’t come across as handsome on television? Because Effan Two had a tendency to spit when she got excited? Would it so traumatize the people of Cartar to see that the geologist working with the Urfer Cheffson was missing two side teeth and had a tendency to huff his solvents before he dropped? Loul knew he was working himself into a solid sulk and that he’d been sitting there far longer
than was normal or proper not saying a word to Meg. It didn’t seem to faze her. She just watched him, curled up into herself in that impossibly flimsy way that he knew he was helpless to not be fascinated by. He knew he’d always give in to the fascination, he’d always let his mouth drop open in wonder, and he’d always choose the course of stupid curiosity over practical safety. That was probably one of the reasons the official crews replaced people like him.

Okay, he was definitely in a sulk now. He didn’t know how to get himself out of it. In time, he figured he and Meg would get back to talking, muddle through the awkwardness until something resembling the old rhythm would fall into place. He wanted to get to that place now. He wanted to skip this part and get to the part where it would be easy again. He wanted to go home and he wanted to talk to Hark and Po. He wanted a hot meal. He wanted to be back in that place where he didn’t have to think so hard about how things worked. He wanted…he just wanted. And he wanted to be able to say this to Meg but he had no idea how to start.

“Loul.” Her eyes were wide and strange looking, stranger looking than usual. They bent down in the far corners in a way he hadn’t seen before and the fine line of hair over them bent in a graceful upward curve. “Loul.” She didn’t say his name as a question and she didn’t say anything else. She just untangled her arms and legs from their tight knot, putting her feet down and resting her hands lightly as always on the table for just a moment. Then he couldn’t see exactly how she did it but she seemed to somehow ripple her spine, bending in a fluid curve until she flowed like oil beneath the table. He could only stare, watching the empty space where her head had been and jumping in surprise when her head popped up at his side of the table. She reversed her weird ripple, lifting and bending herself until she folded into the seat beside him.

He didn’t say anything, couldn’t say anything, surprise robbing him of words. It was harder to see her without turning his body all the way around since she tucked herself in slightly behind him in the booth. She slid closer until the thin line of her legs pressed against his, her pale bare shoulder nudging the thin cloth of his work shirt. He thought at first she was pushing him to move but the pressure was so light he hardly had to resist it. Even folded up as she was, her body was still longer than his and the ridge of her shoulder carriage rested above his. She bent forward, folding one leg sideways, draping the other over it, her hands puddling up in the space between her thin thighs, and she brought her face close to his.

“This is okay? Loul okay Meg here?”

He didn’t know if he was okay or not. He’d been close to Meg before. They’d touched and walked together, brushing up against each other as the Urfers did when they walked but this was different. Meg was different. Hell, he was different. Her skin looked bumpy when her arm brushed against his shirtsleeve, the fine hairs standing on end across her pale skin. He could feel her vibrate as she leaned into him.