Rift (65 page)

So he started walking back to the dome.

As he got closer he saw that things littered the ground everywhere: cast-off pieces of hardware, broken sections of dome, empty food packets, a clipboard, a used-up breather, a discarded jacket. They had left the place a mess.

Moving through the gap in the side of the dome, he plunged into a murky interior. It felt like a tomb, and gave him a little shiver. With relief he found that the lights still worked; he flipped the switch back on. But under the glare of the light tubes, the place seemed
emptier than ever. The canisters were gone; the geo cannon was gone.

He walked aimlessly around, kicking at piles of junk, looking for anything of interest. In the galley he found the remains of breakfast. He sat on the floor spooning cereal into his mouth and staring at the door, expecting at any moment for Koichi or someone else to come in and begin ordering him around. Their ghosts were here, hurrying to and fro, pushing to meet schedule, jostling against each other’s agendas, and sometimes taking time to grouse at Mitya for not standing up straight enough or not saying the right thing. Somewhere under his skin, his body filled with tears, but he kept eating.

After he’d made himself sick on porridge, he wandered out into the main dome and watched as a school of flying insects swarmed in the curtain of light falling through the gap. He was thirsty. Over at the old water gauges he checked on whether the filtration system had been shut off. It had been, so he flicked it back on.

Then he saw someone lying on the other side of the water vat.

Mitya hurried over, his pulse kicking up a storm. It was Stepan. Blood welled from the center of his chest.

“Shot, Mitya, shot …,” Stepan rasped.

Trembling, Mitya pulled aside Stepan’s clothes to look at the wound. Just to the right of center, a round hole seeped bright red.

“I’ll be right back,” Mitya said to him. He rushed to the first-aid stowage bin, where to his relief, everything was still fully stocked. Grabbing an emergency kit, he ran back to Stepan, wondering if he’d be there, if he’d really seen his uncle lying in a spill of blood.

He had. Mitya took out the diagnostic scanner, remembered how to turn it on, and ran it over the wound, his hands trembling.

“Give me a pain patch, Mitya …,” Stepan
gasped, sending an extra spurt of blood out of the wound as he spoke.

Mitya fumbled for the right patch, ripped open two of them, and pressed them onto the back of Stepan’s hand. Then, picking up the diagnostic assembly again, he tried to make sense of the readout.

“It says, ‘Bullet wound, right lung, resulting in secondary hemopneumothorax and secondary respiratory depression.’ And then it says, ‘Apply occlusive dressing.’ ”

“Guess you better do what it says, boy.” Stepan closed his eyes, relaxing into the medication.

Mitya knew little more than how to apply a bandage, but did the best he could.

“Get the whole thing covered real good,” Stepan whispered, sweat beading up on his face. “Keep the air from pushing inside and collapsing my other lung.”

His trachea was bulging over to one side, which the diagnostic said was caused by blood pushing up from the chest. It was calling for intravenous solutions to get the blood pressure stabilized, but that was far beyond the med kit and Mitya’s skill. Bright red bubbles appeared at the edges of Stepan’s mouth. Mitya knew then he was going to die.

He covered Stepan with blankets where he lay, tucking a small pillow beneath his head.

“Mitya …”

“What happened?”

Stepan managed to say, between short gasps for air, “Needed my spot, you see?”

Mitya held Stepan’s hand, grateful for the company, even in this awful circumstance. For a moment he wondered where the gun was that had shot Stepan. Perhaps several guns had been left behind, and could be used to give things a quick end. But he didn’t think he could kill Stepan, or himself.

Stepan was talking again: “It was Gabriel that shot me. Left me for dead, boy. Guess I’m not … yet.”

“The
Captain
shot you?” Mitya was still capable of being shocked, even now, as bad as things were.

Stepan struggled to swallow or to talk. It looked like he was strangling. “Don’t act surprised,” he said. “You know the man.”

Mitya wasn’t sure what to say, so he whispered, “It shouldn’t end this way; it wasn’t supposed to.”

Stepan nodded. “No … wasn’t supposed to. But, Mitya, make sure they give you my place.” He grimaced. “Hurts, boy. Give me another patch.”

The diagnostic warned against this, calling instead for oxygen but Mitya ignored it. He didn’t have oxygen, but he
did
have pain meds.

Finally Stepan closed his eyes, breathing noisily. Mitya couldn’t follow the diagnostic’s directions. It kept giving him more and more information, all of it bad. Stepan’s right lung was shattered, and now the blood in the cavity was pressing against the other lung, plus blood was trickling into the good lung from the right lung. Pretty soon Stepan wouldn’t be able to breathe.

But saving his life was useless anyway. After all, they had only a few hours left in any case.

Mitya sat beside Stepan there on the floor of the dome, staring at a swarm of gnats catching a slice of sunlight from the gap in the wall. After a while Stepan lost consciousness. Helpless to give his uncle any aid, Mitya slipped away to walk and steady his nerves. His hands were shaking and as cold as Stepan’s.

His footsteps echoed in the main dome. Fleeing this ghostly accompaniment, he entered the clean room. Walking down the line of computers, he fired each of them up in turn, until they pulsed and whined, lending their quantum life to the old workroom. He left them on and went in to Bonhert’s quarters. Though curious about the man’s things, he couldn’t bring himself to rummage through the drawers.

He switched on Bonhert’s computer and accessed
the geo simulations for a while. Then he called up the
Quo Vadis
transmission and watched as Captain Kitcher did his grand tour of the ship, then searched and found the real tour of the ship, the tour of the rat warrens.

He swiveled the chair around and stared at the room. The impulse came to lie down on Bonhert’s bunk and sleep, but he couldn’t sleep, not with Stepan dying. Pushing himself out of the luxury chair, Mitya went back to the clean room and its pulsing monitors.

Standing amid the cast-offs of the great expedition to end the world, Mitya thought again about the scenes he’d just reviewed: the
Quo Vadis;
those ship corridors crawling with humanity; the tatters of their clothes. The offer to take on a hundred survivors. Stepan’s words,
You can have my place.…

He turned around and walked slowly back into Bonhert’s room.

Peering into Bonhert’s list of files, he whispered:
What place, Captain?

One by one he called up the files. Eavesdropped on the filed conversations between Bonhert and Kitcher. The negotiations for this privilege and that concession. All friendly on the surface, they danced around each other, evaded, manipulated.

Then Mitya went hunting for the rest of the files.

Bonhert was not a careless man. He’d left his files, but some were deeply protected. The Captain hadn’t counted on anyone having the time to pierce the locks. Mitya had that time—checking on Stepan from time to time, but otherwise solely concentrated on the buried files, the ones Bonhert had deemed inexpedient for others to see.

At last Mitya emerged from Bonhert’s quarters. He walked over to Stepan and sat down next to him. He realized at once that his uncle was dead. Mitya pulled up the blanket to cover Stepan’s face. In the press of things, it was more than he could bear. He heard himself
crying. He’d never heard himself cry out loud, not since he was little, and the sound surprised him. It echoed strangely in the dome. He sat for a time, feeling like the big stone he’d been carrying inside had moved downstream.

He stood up then, looking down at his uncle’s body. “There weren’t a hundred slots,” he told him. “There were ten.” He stared at the lump under the blanket. “You killed Station for the sake of ten people.” He started to walk away, and then turned around again. “And I don’t want
your spot
, Uncle.”

As he strode into the center of the main dome, he scattered a phalanx of armored insects that had begun marching into the place. Foraging for a backpack, he found many to choose from, and stuffed one with enough canteens and snacks to fuel his long hike.

If he could get there in time, those forty crew members might like to start planning which
ten
of them were going to live. They might not come up with the same list as Bonhert.

As he emerged from the dome he took a big breath, tainted, despite his breather, by sulfur. Hitching his pack more comfortably on his shoulders, he set out toward the valley rim. One thing he didn’t have to worry about, at least.

He knew the way to the vent.

4

Loon had begun to know the outfold. It towered over her, hugged her from the sides, sprang into the soles of her feet. Even without touching it, she cried from joy, from relief. Scents could arouse her to powerful sexual spikes that receded quickly, leaving her breathless. Within the plants of the outfold, infrared currents beguiled her. There were no auditory names for the constituents of the outfold, and the true names could not be translated. The name for the tallest growths was
<…,> the movement. To translate meant one must find a human common language equivalent.

But, delightfully, there
were
names for the orthong. Golanifer had a name. It was beautiful to hear. Humans desired to hear names, or they could not relate to individual orthong, and the breeders had to relate, so orthong condescended to assign themselves auditory names, which they spelled in sign, and humans pronounced.

Golanifer was Loon’s friend, if
friend
could describe the feeling she had for this orthong. She suspected it could not. There was an orthong concept for what she felt.… Human concepts, orthong concepts—she moved back and forth in her viewpoint, wanting to drop the human but not entirely able.

Loon reached out to touch the blue coils clustered on the ground like barrel hoops. The colors sequenced through azure to turquoise to glistening purple. An orthong hand clutched suddenly at her wrist, stopping her. She looked into Golanifer’s reproachful eyes.

She knew she mustn’t touch things without permission. But it was a great temptation to finger the blue coils seething with light, and receive their bestowal of hot energy.

Golanifer chided yet again.

Loon drew back her hand. She wished very much not to offend her teacher. Golanifer was old, with shoulders covered by a silver-skinned mantle. Loon had never been in the presence of such a wondrous being. She could smell Golanifer’s unique essence, and it made her giddy.

They had been walking for hours. Everywhere, weavers stopped their work and came up to them, watching Loon out of slitted eyes, and then gradually asked questions, touching her on the arms. Having trouble understanding that Loon had no memories from the womb, they asked questions that she couldn’t answer. When they wanted answers about humans,
Loon sometimes forgot what a human would do and say. But they were very patient with her, except for some who hung back—those who Golanifer said were unreceptive to the mixing of human and orthong, and must be given time to adjust to Divoranon’s decree.

The outer and inner colors of the outfold, along with their scents, played on Loon’s emotions, making it difficult to attend to the weavers’ questions. Golanifer was a steadying influence, taking Loon’s emotional surges in stride, calming her confusion and some of her delight with matter-of-fact explanations. Loon could sense the condescension, but it didn’t matter. Loon was half mad, and knew it.

The habitat was very active just now, changing by the hour. Weavers could be seen everywhere, touching the growths of the outfold, cupping their palms along stalks, fingering the surfaces of their creations. They had hardened many square miles of the perimeter outfold and transformed others into poison zones. Even though the habitat was not in immediate danger of attack, the weavers instinctively altered the outfold for defense.