Damocles (25 page)

Numbers self-populated in the database as well. Meg and Loul didn’t deal much with numbers in their conversations although it was nice to have the means to discuss sequences and preferences.
First
and
last
and
next
and
later
followed naturally from the language of numbers, and soon both of them ignored the number bar scrolling along the bottom of the screen. Meg let the ever-emerging text boxes move over them, sliding them into bundles that now made sense to Loul. But there was one box of numbers she never covered. She never referred or pointed to it but very casually made a point of always keeping it mostly uncovered. Before he’d known the number system, he’d assumed
the flashing symbols were some sort of data counter like the kind used in telemetry, a marker of sort for tracking research. Once the small box of Cartar writing appeared under it, however, he saw the box was indeed a counter, only these numbers were going down, steadily decreasing and heading toward zero. A countdown.

She wound up sleeping with Prader after Kik swung the welding arc and burned Prader’s hand too badly to be ignored. All the excitement of the communication and data breakthrough had made the engineer jittery, and Prader had sworn like it was her job when the blue arc whipped across the back of her wrist. The injury wasn’t too serious; she didn’t need surgery, and she wasn’t in any grave danger. However, the Ply-Patch needed to cover the area and regrow the skin, which required her to keep her hand immobile for at least six hours. Cho declared that the only way Prader could remain immobile for six hours was to either tie her down or tranquilize her. With as straight a face as she could muster, Meg suggested that the tying-down option was too difficult to explain culturally. And so Prader and Cho had swapped sleeping shifts.

Cho wanted to keep an eye on the Ply-Patch while Prader slept, not trusting the restless engineer to be still enough even while unconscious, and Meg had bitten back her laugh watching Cho wrestle with the logistics. Meg needed sleep. She was two hours behind her sleep time and could feel her brain getting foggy. Cho and the Effans worked close by the tent she and Cho shared. It made sense that Prader would swap out and sleep in the tent with her. The problem was she knew Cho was more than a little particular about things like tent sharing.

“Have you seen their sleep pad?” he’d asked her one day after Jefferson and Prader had climbed out. “It’s like a gravel driveway. Do they even brush their hair? I mean, I don’t want to fall back on any Galen Colony stereotypes, but does Jefferson even own a brush? And when’s the last time Prader washed that halter?” Meg had laughed, letting Cho gripe. They all had their peculiarities. Now, however, that peculiarity was being tested as Prader climbed into the shelter beside her, flopping back on Cho’s sleep pad without even kicking off her shoes. Her arm was splinted, the Ply-Patch was securely taped down, and Cho tried not to look as a clatter of small pebbles poured from her pockets when she settled back. He gave her the sedative and crawled from the tent without a word.

“He’s always such a crab,” Prader said, shifting against the small pillow. “How can you stand him? Does he ever smile?”

“He smiles plenty.”

“Yeah, I bet,” she snorted. “Especially when you’re in here, right? Well, just remember I’m not him. Don’t be rolling over into me copping a feel tonight.”

“I don’t know, Prader,” Meg said around a yawn. “You smell pretty manly.”

“I do, don’t I?” She laughed, not sounding at all affected by the sedative. She draped her arm over her eye the same way Cho often did. “I wish it would get dark. I miss it being dark.”

Meg closed her eyes. “Me too. I can’t understand how it is we have the technology to travel across space and yet nobody has been able to design a pair of eyeshades that actually stay on while you sleep.”

“Tell me about it. Ow, shit. My hand hurts. That freaking Kik.”

“Keep it still. If you bend the patch it won’t bond.”

“I know, I know, I know.”

Prader sighed, fidgeting and kicking her feet against the edge of the sleep pad. Meg almost told her to knock it off, but there was something nice about her restlessness. The high pitch of her sighs and impatient sounds reminded Meg of sharing a bed all those years ago with Maddie. Her twin had never been able to just let go like Meg could, and instead fought sleep with the boundless energy that always gripped her. Prader flipped the sheet off of her legs, pointing her feet toward the ceiling of the low tent and softly tapping along the brace there.

“You know what I wonder about?”

Meg laughed. “Why tranquilizers don’t work on you?”

Prader ignored her. “Where do they live?”

“What do you mean? They have houses and stuff. We saw it on the recon.”

“Yeah but, I mean, what do they do there?” Prader dropped her legs and rolled onto her side, carefully keeping her injured hand on her hip. “They don’t sleep so why do they have houses? What do they do there?”

Meg squinted at her in the red filtered light. “We do more than sleep in our houses.”

“But think about it. Why do we have houses in the first place? Every creature on Earth sleeps, right? Everything sleeps. And everything, on land at least, is vulnerable while it sleeps. It digs a hole or builds a burrow or climbs a tree so that it can sleep. It makes a safe place so it can sleep and its kids can sleep, right? That’s the whole reason humans banded together in the first place, to light the fire and circle the wagons and be safe in the dark while we slept.”

“True.”

“So why do they have houses? How big are they? Are they just like ‘Here’s my kitchen and my closet and, uh, here’s where I stay awake all the time’? See what I mean? What the hell do
they do all day? When there aren’t aliens invading their planet, I mean.”

Meg thought about that. “Well, they have families. They have entertainment—movies and TV and stuff. I guess they just have a lot more time for it.”

“Man,” Prader kicked her toes together, her voice thickening with sleep. “Can you imagine if you never had to sleep? How much you could get done? That’d be awesome.”

“It would be awful. I love sleep.” She pulled the sheet up to her chin even though she wasn’t cold. Heat came off Prader’s body in waves. “I love dreams. Even bad ones.”

Prader snickered. “You like sleep because you get to get busy with Dr. Cho, Evil Eye. You like to get your hands on all those mojo signs he’s got on his body.”

“You’re one to talk. I’ve heard more than one bump-’n’-grind groan coming from your tent. Gettin’ a little orange slice, are ya?” They both giggled at the slur. After a few generations, the minerals in the Galen Colonies soil had added a copper tinge to the residents’ skin. The Galens wore it with pride but were not above throwing a fist if someone cast aspersions upon their skin tone. Prader made it her mission to bring it up to Jefferson at every opportunity. He took it in stride, referring to himself as her “personal vitamin C.”

Prader yawned large, her breath sour from her steady diet of Gro-Wall beans. “Well just between you and me, I think Jeff and the captain are trading more than data packets, if you know what I mean.” She rolled onto her back, her injured hand cradled to her stomach.

“What?” Meg asked, sitting up. “You’ve got to be kidding me?” Prader said nothing, her breathing soft and even. “Now you fall asleep? After that little nugget of gossip?” She flopped back down, shaking her head. A rough rasping started beside her. Of course Prader would snore.

Loul tried not to show his relief when he saw that Cho wasn’t going into stasis with Meg. That meant the Effans would be busy and he would have time to think. He wanted so badly to talk with Po and Reno Dado, especially Reno Dado. Of all the crazy alien stuff she had laughed at over the years, she had always believed that psychics could hear vibrations from people. She had even taken meditation courses trying to “align her vibrations with her true vocation.” Po had ridiculed her for it but Loul had managed to keep a straight face. He couldn’t wait to tell her she’d been right. Sort of.

Meg had been more preoccupied with her injured crewmate and the treatment Cho provided than with Loul’s disappointment at her need for stasis. After all these rounds, he still felt that ache when he knew she would disappear for at least a shift. He was getting better at sensing when her stasis was due. The Urfers followed a time schedule that worked independently of the shifting colors of the suns. According to Cho, via the Effans, their bodies functioned on an Urf rhythm that couldn’t be altered. The more strictly these rhythms were observed, the better the Urfers functioned. Even with the schedule, each Urfer spent several moments after stasis unprepared to return to work. Meg called those periods
morning
.

Cho warned the Effans that because he was missing his normal stasis shift he might become less energetic as they worked. Meg had laughed at that, recording the word
grumpy
into the language program. When Loul went to repeat it, she touched
no
and laughed. More Urfer humor. Whatever
grumpy
meant, if Cho didn’t go down with Meg, that meant the Effans would be occupied while Meg was gone. Before she climbed into her shelter, Loul tapped her arm, resting his knuckles on her wristband.

She’d stared at him and then grinned. “Yes.” She unbuckled the thin band and handed it to him. “Loul read words. Loul open screen?” He tried to replicate the pinching movement she used to draw the screen from the red light but nothing happened. Meg drew the screen out for him, showing him how to balance it on his fingertips so it wouldn’t close when he moved. He watched the screen fill with text boxes, pictures, and symbols, all filling in with the ever-improving Cartar vocabulary interface.

He balanced the incorporeal thing on his fingertips, afraid to move. She smiled, patting his arm. “Screen no good then ask Cho. Cho make screen good. Okay?”

He wanted to tap his knuckles but didn’t want to disturb the screen. “Okay,” he said, rising up with the light above his hands. “Loul read.” Meg smiled and he stepped away to make room for Prader and Cho to climb in after her.

She hadn’t given him any warning about the screen. She hadn’t made any sign to hide anything or change the program in any way that he could tell. Surely she understood that he was going to look through the files, and, as his language filled in the gaps, he would understand what he saw there. That meant she wasn’t hiding anything, right? He didn’t kid himself about the very real probability that anything secret wouldn’t be on this database to begin with. Even he, a lowly weather watcher, had access and passwords for classified files. Information could be hidden. As he made his way across the work site, moving as carefully as possible so nothing would happen to the screen, he kept his eye on the numbers ticking down in the upper-right corner of the screen. He had a theory, and he had at least a shift alone to work on it.

He had 08:42:33 to work on it. Whatever that meant. The thirty-three counted down so quickly he could hardly follow it, and by the time he made it to his booth, he had 08:39:57.

He didn’t just watch the numbers ticking off. That made him too nervous. Maybe it was nothing, maybe it was part of the clock that kept their rigid sleeping and eating schedule. Maybe it was nothing more than the battery life of whatever was powering this computer. He poked around on the screen, listening to the strange pastiche of recordings putting together phrases. Maybe those numbers didn’t mean anything important, but Meg never covered them up. She never explained them, but she never let them disappear. Meg was many things—mysterious, expressive, and enthralling—but she wasn’t careless. She kept her eye on those numbers.

He realized the screen didn’t respond as well to the rough skin of his fingers, often skipping commands and falling silent. When he opened his pads, however, the boxes lit up easily, the screen scrolling through prompts as it did for Meg. He pulled up photographs of Urf and lost himself in images of rolling seas and grassy plains, huge buildings and crowded squares. It some ways it didn’t seem that different from Didet. The people obviously looked a lot different and their clothes were nothing like the Urfers on-site wore. The clothes in photographs were full of color and pressed into strange shapes and designs. Sometimes everyone in a picture wore the same outfit; sometimes everyone dressed differently, but so many of the pictures could have passed for badly developed Didet photos. If the film got overexposed and somehow the images lengthened so that the people were longer and paler, he could almost see the pictures of his own family gathered around at different events. People smiled, crowded in close. Babies were held up to cameras, and there were even pictures of mothers and fathers pressing their lips into the spot where the babies’ rose spots should have been.

He could spend all day looking at the pictures. He scrolled through, looking for the photos Meg had spoken of when Urf
was in darkness.
Night
she called it, but since there was no word equivalent in Cartar, he couldn’t scan for it that way. He couldn’t even find the button for it on the language screen, the nontranslated words having fallen behind the opened translated boxes. He took care as he searched, however, to keep the rolling numbers visible.

04:22:13 and counting.

Meg had gone into stasis halfway through full red. Now the Ellaban Sun rose over the peaks, and they were in the thick of Eller-orange. By his calculation, Meg should be coming out of the shelter just as the Eller shift ended, early in high orange. He did some simple math. The countdown should be right around 02:40:40. He could remember that. Two-four-four.

At 03:05:05 he shifted in the booth so he could keep an eye on Meg’s shelter. He had found the pictures of
night
and hadn’t even noticed how far into Eller-orange they’d gotten. The photographs were incredible, somehow capturing light against the velvet blackness of the Urf sky. He’d seen Space, he knew that blackness, and he longed to see it again. He never imagined he would be seeing it captured on film over an alien planet. One sun. Urf had one sun. He had stumbled upon photographs of huge sections of the planet that were too cold to live in. They were white with ice—ice on the planet. He’d only ever seen ice on the satellite lenses when they went above the atmosphere. He couldn’t imagine these long, thin creatures, the Urfers whose skin was so delicate that wind rocks could cut them, being able to exist, to thrive on a planet extreme enough to have ice on its surface.