In the Ocean of Night (14 page)

One of them had stared straight at him, seen in an instant what his mind’s eye was up to and given him a crooked insane grin, eyes crossed. He slowed, stopped. Tried to read the deliciously red lips. Came closer. And met Alexandria.

The past was really not a scroll or an ornament for the mind to do with as it liked; no. It was a fog, a white cloud made of pale dead brain cells that once stored memory, their loss a sloughing off of detail and everyday incident, until only a few moments, warm random yellow lights, shine through the fog. Whether he had met Shirley first, or Alexandria, was not clear to him any longer. He had been reeling away from the whole oppressive NASA thing, without realizing it, and when Alexandria appeared he washed up on the shore of her. He remembered talking to her, very earnestly, over clear glasses of Vouvray, chilled so that it almost numbed the lips to drink it. Remembered hikes on the southern slopes of Palomar Mountain, past the ruins of the great telescope, lizards scuttling in the sunlight. And dry nights, dim and strange after the setting sun, with that cool stagnancy that pervades the California coastal towns.

Early on, when things were still cementing, Shirley and Alexandria still saw each other separately, in elaborately arranged schedules, but soon they saw the comedy of it and became more natural. Their circle of friends constricted until he and Alexandria became a circle of two, complete together, though not obsessive, not clutching at each other. They each lived in the world, moving and doing, she at American Airlines and he at NASA, but each in an orbit that defined the locus of the center: the place where they both met. About this center Shirley orbited, a moon bound to their planetary influence. Always changing, always shifting, the spaces around the three had still a Pythagorean simplicity, a unity centered on the two—

“Nigel. Wake
up,
Nigel!”

Shirley loomed over him, blotting out the sun. “We’ve got to go. She’s feeling nauseous again.”

He sat up. Alexandria smiled wanly a few meters away, eyes hollowed and dark, a shadow of the woman he had conjured up a moment before. He wrenched his eyes away.

They took the express coach to the Orange County Fall Fair, coasting high on the Santa Ana freeway above the punctured, burnished ruins of La Mirada and Disneyland, now asprawl with groves of oranges again.

Alexandria potted earnestly at moving dummy targets, felling three with wadded paper bullets and winning a wooden doll that grinned with manic love. They rode the looper, relishing the seconds of delicious free fall. They inspected the implausibly fattened cattle, stared into the blank brown eyes of lambs, stroked the matted heads of baby goats.

A ring of singing New Sons accosted them. Nigel brushed them off and Alexandria lingered behind to speak to them, beyond his earshot.

They sat under cloth umbrellas and ate fair food: tacos, pasta salad, crisp
sansejens.
Nigel slurped at a tankard.

And Alexandria said with sudden finality, “We should have had children.”

“Alexandria,
no,
we thought it through. Our jobs—” “But then there would have been
some
thing…”

She blinked rapidly, swallowed and bit into her simbani and noodles.

Uncomfortably, Nigel glanced at the next table. A mother was urging her son to finish his taco so that the family could go see the cattle show. “Ummm, mmmm, mommy.” The boy artlessly fumbled the taco into his left hand and dropped it theatrically on the ground. The maneuver was well timed; his mother looked back to see the taco tumble, but not early enough to see his preparations. “Oh,” he said unconvincingly.

“All through,” Alexandria said.

Nigel turned and found she was smiling again.

“Right, I see that. What I can’t make out is why
I
must have a telltale installed.” Nigel leaned forward, shoulders hunched, elbows on Hufman’s desk. Alexandria sat silent, hands folded. Hufman grimaced and started over:

“Because I can’t rely on Alexandria carrying her pickup monitor everywhere. Her telltale is much more complex than yours—it taps directly into the nervous system—but its radio transmitter hasn’t got enough range. If she got beyond her pickup, she could have a brain stem hemorrhage, go into a coma, and you’d think she was just dozing. But with a pickup telltale inset behind your ear, you’d know something was wrong even if she’d left her monitor behind.”

“And fetch you.”

“An emergency team, not me.” Hufman sighed, looking frayed and tired. “If you two are going to travel or even go on long walks, the telltales are necessary.”

“It won’t screw up my inner ear or my balance, anything like that? NASA has to approve any—”

“I know, Mr. Walmsley. They’ll okay it; I checked.” “Nigel, yours is only an—” Alexandria glanced at Hufman.

“Acoustic transducer,” Hufman supplied.

“Yes. Mine is a complete diagnostic communicator. We’ll both be tagged with the same transmission code, but yours will be, well, just a warning light for mine. You—”

“I know, right,” Nigel said, jerking to his feet. He paced nervously. “You say mine can come right back out, just pop the cork and I’m good as new?”

“Painless.” Hufman regarded him steadily. “We’ll be able to interrogate Alexandria’s diagnostics, or check yours to see if it’s receiving properly, without touching either of you.”

Nigel blinked rapidly, jittery. He hated operations of any kind, could barely tolerate the NASA physicals. But what upset him here was the calm, assured way Hufman and Alexandria talked about the possibility of massive damage to her nervous system. Of a wasting disease, a slow seeping away of function. Then the hemorrhage. Then—

“Of course. Of course I’ll do it. Now that I understand. Of course.”

He flew to Houston for his routine tests and workout. Nigel arrived with two other astronauts, all doing ground work but remaining on standby for deep space operations. They flew in on commercial transport; the days of private planes for astronauts had vanished long before. The other two men were of the usual mold: robust, good-humored, competitive. Nigel weathered the physical tests, including the long-standing worst—cold water, poured in an ear, causing the eyeballs to whirl as the confused brain struggles with input from two semicircular canals, one warm and the other cold; the world tilted madly. Then a day in a practice module, immersed in a universe of switches, manifolds, pipes, tanks, sensors, valves, connectors, hardware without end. They centrifuged him in it, timed his reflexes. He relearned the tricks of breathing under high gs: balloon the lungs and then suck in air in rapid little pants, breathing off the top. Finally, on the fifth day, he arced into a low orbit on a milk-run shuttle craft. In zero g his blood pooled in different parts of his body, fooling the body into thinking that his blood volume had increased. His urine output rose, hormones accumulated, all within the acceptable parameter range. He passed, renewed his credentials, and sped earthward. The shuttle landed in Nevada. He arrived back at their apartment to find that Alexandria had entered the hospital for an overnight biopsy, all standard, and that Shirley was alone there, reading.

He puttered about, unpacking. As they went to bed Nigel realized this was the first time they had spent the night together since the days when he’d first met Shirley, through Alexandria. Even then their intimacy had a forced quality to it, a seeming inevitability without its own intrinsic momentum. Touching her, he worked awkwardly for the right rhythm. They fumbled with each other’s bodies, unfamiliar packages they could not open. At last they gave it up with mumbled apologies, a half-muttered theory about fatigue and the lateness of the hour, and sank into a relieved sleep, back to back, the sheets making a loose tent over the space between them.

In the long afternoons as Alexandria rested, he pored over decades of scientific research and speculations. There was a cycle, he saw: as the twentieth century wore on, the assertion that life was common in the universe rose from the status of an improbability to a common assumption, until the radio listening programs began. Then, after several decades of null results, a certain zest went out of the search. Expensive radio telescopes cupped an ear to the fizzle of interstellar hydrogen, and then, as budgets ran short, the programs died. There was no dramatic change in the scientific underpinning—the evolution of matter seemed to almost require that life arise in many sites—but faith lagged. If the galaxy swarmed with life, why were there no prominent radio beacons left to guide us? Why no galactic library? Perhaps man was simply too impatient; he should listen for a century, calmly, without counting the cost. Nigel wondered how the debate over use of the radio telescopes would shift when word of the Snark became widespread. Did one example of a visitor change the odds that much? Emotionally, perhaps so. The key was the Snark itself.

They still attended parties in the homes of friends, or visited Shirley’s cramped apartment in Alta Dena, but Alexandria found her tolerance for alcohol weakened. She tired early and asked to be taken home.

Her work schedule slipped from three days a week, to two, then one. The Brazilian deal went on, gathering legal complexity, like a ball of wool picking up lint. She fell behind and was given more and more circumscribed tasks to complete.

Nigel resisted Shirley’s persuasions to attend New Sons… meetings? rallies? services? He could not tell whether Shirley went because of Alexandria, or the other way around. Alexandria, knowing him, scarcely mentioned it.

He rose in the early morning and read the New Son books, the
New Revelations,
the intellectual super structure. It seemed a Tinkertoy religion to him, assembled from the detachable sprockets and gears of earlier faiths. Through the center of it ran the turbine he’d suspected: a parody of the Old Testament God, obsessed with the power of His own name, capable of minute bookkeeping in the lives of the devout, to decide their salvation. This God carried the whole suitcase full of wars, disease, floods, earthquakes and agonizing death to visit upon the unconvinced. And, apparently, believed in preposterous connections between Buddha, Christ, Joseph Smith and Albert Einstein; indeed, had caused them all, with a tweak of the holy hand.

Nigel slammed the
New Revelations
shut on this mean-minded God, rose and padded quietly into the bedroom. Alexandria lay sleeping, head tilted back and mouth open.

He had never seen her sleep this way before. The thrust of her body seemed to belie the fact of rest. Tense yet vulnerable. He had a sudden perception of death: a small thing moving in from the distance, winging slowly in the night air as she slept. Searching out the house. Through a window. Into the shadowed bedroom. Silent, slow. Fluttering. Fluttering into her sagging mouth.

EIGHT

Lubkin called frequently. Nigel listened but volunteered little; nothing more had been learned about the Snark, so there seemed no purpose in speculating. Lubkin was all atremble over the President’s appointment of an Executive Committee, headed by a man named Evers, to monitor the situation. ExComm, Lubkin called it. The Committee was meeting at JPL in a week; would Nigel come?

He did, begrudgingly. Evers proved to be a deeply tanned, athletic-looking sort, well groomed and noncommittal. He carried the air of one who had been in charge of things for so long that his leadership was assumed, a fact hardly worth remarking upon. Evers took Nigel aside before the formal meeting and pumped him for an estimate of what the Snark was up to, where it would go. Nigel had his own ideas, but he told Evers that he hadn’t a clue.

The meeting itself proved to be a lot of talk with precious little new data. The Venus rendezvous seemed quite probable now, after detailed analysis of the Mars encounter. Why the Snark should be doing this was another matter. Since the communications satellite nets were completed in the 2010s, Earth was no longer a strong radio or TV emitter. A magnetic implosion-induced rainbow artfully produced in Saudi Arabia was transmitted to Japan by direct beaming through a satellite; no signals leaked out of the atmosphere anymore. It was conceivable that the Snark hadn’t picked up intelligible electromagnetic signals from Earth until it was near Mars. But still, why Venus? Why go there?

Nigel felt a certain wry amusement at Evers and his scientific advisors. When pressed on a point they would hedge and slip into their neutral jargon; a simple “I think” became “it is suggested that”; opinions were given in the passive voice, devoid of direct authorship.

It came to him as the meeting broke up that, compared to this slippery committee and the unreadable Evers, he probably preferred the riddle now riding toward Venus, a thing known only by its blossoming orange fusion flame.

Lubkin called. The Snark did not respond to a beamed radio signal, or to a laser pulse.

Of course not, Nigel thought. The thing isn’t naive anymore. It’s had a squint or two at daytime 3D and grown cautious. It wants time to study us before putting a toe in the water.

More news: Evers was upping the budget. New specialists were being called in, though none was given the whole picture, none knew what all this was really about. The Ichino fellow was working out well. Tracking went on. No sign of the Snark.

Nigel nodded, murmured something and went back to Alexandria.

And Alexandria was right, he saw: the two of them had been on a plateau for years. He recalled the boy at the Orange County Fall Fair. People with children had a natural benchmark. They grew, developed; you could see your effort giving into a living human being, a new element in the world’s compound. Alexandria had climbed up through a corporate anthill. Her progress was merely vertical, without human dimension. The Brazilians would buy the damned airline, that much was clear by now, and how, precisely, could that enter the sum of her life?