Post by kaliszewski on Mar 11, 2007 1:13:59 GMT -5
Okay: this is a big, nasty one. Had to split it arbitrarily across two posts 'cause these ProBoard servers get twitchy about chunks of text over 25,000 characters in length. Rated PG-13 for language, sensuality, and brief violence. Weird themes, too-- but I don't think the MPAA puts out feelers for those. Settle in, folks: it's time for
SLEEPERS
Capa woke up crying. They all saw. He didn’t seem to mind them seeing: more than the fact that they considered him a friend or at least a close colleague and were honestly concerned for him, he seemed genuinely unaware of their noticing. Not that any of them initially were in any condition, really, to notice anything.
Mace, for example, first saw Capa crying only because their chambers in the lab were side by side. Mace woke aware most intensely of the brilliance of the white light filling his eyes; he was secondarily most aware of the rushing in his ears, which he realized after fifteen dull seconds of simply sitting was the blood cascading through the arteries in his neck. All of them were sitting up, in their white skivvies, swaying slightly to the unfamiliar everyday flows and rhythms of their own bodies. Capa was on Mace’s left; Cassie was to Capa’s left. Mace dully watched her raise her hands slowly to her temples. On her face was a look of drunken concentration, teetering at the edge of frustration. She looked his way.
“Whoa,” he mouthed at her.
Then he nodded toward Capa. Cassie turned her head slowly to look. Capa was sitting with his hands in his lap. His shoulders were loose, his blue-glass eyes half-closed. Tears were running down his cheeks.
“Capa--?” Mace said hoarsely. “Hey, man. Capa?”
Capa looked toward him. “Mace.”
“You okay?”
Capa licked his lips. He wasn’t making eye contact.
“I’m cold,” he said.
*****
“I love this part,” said Jeff Lasky.
The supervising head of mission services for the Icarus II Project was a man sized for an earlier century, lean and narrow-shouldered in his gray lab coat. His eyes were a pale watery blue; his features were vague if once handsome, as though someone had taken an unfocused picture of his face from years ago and stuck it over his face. His forehead was high; faded golden hair hung in wisps like spindrift on the top of his head. The holobadge on his lapel titled him “Doctor.” Through a wall of one-way glass, he was watching the crew of the Icarus II wake from compressed cryo-sleep. Compressed in that, through the administration of a c[o]cktail of semi-experimental chemicals and subsequent slumber in modified sensory-deprivation tanks, the six men and two women of the Icarus II had experienced in the space of an early morning and afternoon roughly the equivalent of eight months’ deep unconsciousness. Now they were waking.
To his left, Daniel Monroe, who was, as Lasky liked to quip, Lasky’s “left hand of God” when it came to project rank and who wore also a lab coat and the label “Doctor,” looked through the dark glass at the crew of the Icarus II, struggling through various stages of helpless stillness to re-orient themselves to the conscious world. He was quite Lasky’s opposite in terms of build-- he’d had the childhood nickname “Ape,” and he could still hear its echoes, even through a cladding of muscle and tidy grooming and academic degrees-- and in terms of outlook as well. He muttered: “That’s because you’re a fcking sadist.”
“Say something, Dan?” Dr. Lasky asked mildly.
“No.”
“Looks like Dr. Capa is having trouble.”
Capa was standing with a hand over his face. His head was down; his shoulders were shaking in countermotion to the deep breaths he was drawing into and shoving from his lungs. Monroe glanced at the man’s readings on the instrument bank to his right. Vitals good. But he looked crushed somehow. He’d been a model of modulated energy when he’d arrived with the others; he bordered on “delicate” in terms of build and was deceptively young-looking, but he’d been buoying himself along seemingly on a combination of bright-eyed quick focus and wiry muscle. Now he looked like a little boy. The two in the crew who were most obviously his friends, the slight dark-haired woman called Cassidy and the most military-looking of the men, Mace, were with him. Capa pulled his hand down to his jaw. He was scowling at something, not at them; Monroe heard his flat voice through the burble on the intercom: “I’m alright. I’m fine.”
Then Monroe realized: He’s scowling at the tears in his eyes. The doctor frowned. “He’s crying.”
“Looks like we’ve got a washout,” Lasky said. “Got another one right there." He pointed at the glass, toward the opposite side of the room, where the Icarus’ doctor, Searle, was standing beside his chamber, not moving, not blinking. He was swaying slightly on his feet. Next to him were the crew’s botanist, the woman Corazon, and Trey, the ship’s navigator. Corazon laid a hand on Searle’s left bicep, and even from twenty feet away, Monroe saw a shudder rumble its way through the doctor’s strongly built frame. Searle grimaced; he gingerly removed Corazon’s hand from his arm.
“Please don’t. Don’t do that,” he said. A concerned frown settled on Corazon’s clean-boned face; she let her hand drop to her side.
Next to Monroe, behind the glass, Lasky smiled. “Let’s get started on the debriefings, shall we?”
*****
First, though, came detox. A tech with a high forehead and a young but pinched face entered the lab bearing a tray holding eight large plastic cups. Inside the cups was a mossy-colored semi-liquid that looked like it had been scraped from dock pilings.
“You folks are scheduled for debriefing,” he said to Kaneda and his crew. “First, though, you have to drink this. All of it. There are bathrooms there and there--” -- and he nodded to the ends of the lab. “Extra ones in the hall.”
“Why do we need to know that?” Trey asked.
“I think we’re about to find out,” Corazon said.
Doubtful looks all around. Kaneda took the first glass, his hand shaking slightly, and raised it to the others.
“To your health. Ladies. Gentlemen.”
*****
What did you dream?
Sometimes it was simple. The military types were the easiest with whom to deal. They were typically straightforward; said straightforwardness usually permeated every aspect of their lives. Even their dreams.
For instance, Mace. He lounged back on the sofa in Monroe’s office, stretched, put a hand behind his head. “Stars. I’m lying on my back in a field of long grass. Warm night. Insects buzzing, but nothing’s biting me. No mosquitoes. I can smell the grass. Sweet, y’know? Spicy, kinda. And I’m counting stars. Like diamond chips up in the sky.”
“Is anyone with you, Mr. Mace?”
Mace looked at him and grinned slyly. “That’d be telling, sir.”
*****
Or Cassidy:
“I’m running,” she said.
“What are you running from, Miss Cassidy?” Monroe asked.
“Nothing. I’m running toward-- I’m not sure.”
“Is it something good or something bad?”
“Good. Definitely good. I’m running on a trail through a forest. Sunlight through the leaves. And the sun is--” She smiled. “You know how kids do those drawings--? Like the sun is smiling?”
“Could you stop running if you wanted to?”
“Yes. But I don’t want to. I mean, I feel fine. I can feel my breath in my lungs and my heart beating. I can feel the trail beneath my shoes-- and they’re my favorite old runners-- and the sun’s on my hair and shoulders, and the wind’s in my face-- and it’s perfect. Just-- perfect.”
*****
But things weren’t as simple with the others. Nor as perfect. When all of his crew had finished debriefing and dressing, Kaneda met them in the reception area outside the lab.
“We will not be sleeping our way to the sun,” he said.
“Why not?” Harvey asked.
“Two of us reacted less than optimally to the procedure.”
Mace spoke: “Did they say who?”
“That information is confidential, Mr. Mace.” Kaneda looked around at his crew, the barest hint of troubling on his bearded face. “For the remainder of the day, we are to rest. The procedure may leave us with residual disorientation. Doctors Lasky and Monroe suggest that we forgo our mission-related duties until tomorrow.”
*****
For people given a day off-- such as remained of this day-- they were surprisingly sober as they walked the long hall leading out of the mission health center. Capa stalked on ahead, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his parka. The others followed. Mace touched Cassie’s arm, slowed his pace. She slowed with him.
“So who do you think flipped out?” he asked.
“Not us.”
“Goes without saying.”
“Searle. He’s wound too tight.”
“My thought, too. Who else?”
Cassie hesitated. Mace followed her line of sight to Capa’s hunched shoulders.
“Maybe you should go after him,” he said. “Stick with him for a while.”
She glanced at him wryly. “Yes, sir.”
Mace smiled. “Like you’ll be suffering.”
*****
Trey watched Cassie join Capa, watched him acknowledge her with a slight smile and a smattering if not of pleasure then of relief. They walked off together, not touching, certainly not holding hands. Still, Trey had to try not to look mortified. He failed. He felt it in his gut like a sputtering hot backwash of that awful detoxifier.
Said Harvey, at his side: “Maybe she’ll be a triple-timer. You never know.”
“Shut up.” Trey sounded harsher than he meant to; he was having a hard time shaking his unsteadiness. It felt as if it were broadcasting from his midriff: not nausea, exactly, nor fear. Something between the two.
“Oh, come on,” said Harvey-- and Trey caught a slight quaver in his voice-- “We’re all gonna be village bicycles by the time this is over.”
“You’re married.”
“It’s nearly a three-year mission. Things can happen.”
“Your wife okay with that?”
If he sounded bitter, Harvey didn’t seem to mind. He was a good man that way, Harvey was. “We’ve talked. There’s things we-- She understands.”
“Wish we could’ve slept it.”
“Well, we can’t.”
They were back at the dorms, lingering in the old comfortable early evening dimness of the common area, when Trey finally asked: “Do you think it was me? One of the ones who cracked?”
“Should I think it was you?”
“No.” Trey chose and arranged his next words carefully. “See-- it wasn’t this. The sleep thing. But I’m wondering how much all of these doctors know about us. I told someone something at our first psych screenings--”
Harvey smiled. “What? That you’re a hacker map geek?”
“No. That I was doing it for my cat.”
“It--? You mean the mission.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll pray for you.” Harvey shook his head at Trey’s questioning look. “Nothing personal. It’s a Lutheran thing. We pray for people.”
“Really.”
“Yeah, really.”
“Pray for my cat, then.”
“Okay: I’ll pray for your cat.”
Trey smiled, a little sheepishly. “Thanks.”
From the direction of the kitchen, Mace approached, carrying a cup of something that smelled like either coffee or motor oil. He blew steam from the surface, sipped. “You guys doing alright?”
Harvey and Trey exchanged looks; they both looked toward Searle, who was sprawled on the sofa with a reader screen propped on his chest. He seemed to be looking right through it.
“I, umm--” Trey frowned, considering. “I don’t want to be alone right now.”
Mace said to him while following Trey’s worried look to the doctor on the sofa: “Do you know how gay that sounds?”
“Yeah, I do. And I don’t care.”
“I know what you mean, man,” Harvey said.
Mace looked at him. “Your old lady coming in tonight?”
“No. Next weekend.”
“What say we bowl a few games, grab a couple beers?”
“At that place in--” Trey snorted. “Man, that’s a dive.”
“Naw, it’ll be fun. Maybe we’ll get in a bar fight.” Mace called toward the sofa: “You in, Searle?”
Searle shut off the screen and sat up. He looked as though he’d been asleep. “What about Capa and Cassie?”
Trey tried not to sound resentful. He very nearly succeeded. “Think they’re, uh, getting in some quality time.”
Mace pasted on a grin. “Like we’d need Brainiac in a fight anyway.”
Searle stood. “I was thinking of Cassie.” He seemed to thaw as he spoke. “Those little Air Force gals, they’re fierce.”
*****
The fierce one and her quiet charge, meanwhile, had strolled their way to the Treehugger Cafe, the most militantly vegetarian restaurant for three hundred miles, if one were to believe the mantra topping the blackboard that served as a menu. When Capa suggested the place, Cassie’s gut response was an instantaneous and almost primordial craving for a hamburger-- and she could almost hear Mace laughing: “So Brainiac dragged you to the Dirtweed Express!” But she kept her cravings and imaginings to herself. Rare enough to see Capa eat on a good day; his suggesting food of any kind after his trauma this afternoon was a very positive sign.
They descended a treacherous flight of open-backed stairs into a cramped but clean and warm dining area not unlike a cave where they sat on indifferently legged chairs at a heavy wooden table and ate sweet potato and apple and ginger soup and tore and dunked chunks of herb bread and drank green tea from old stoneware mugs. People sat around them, students mostly, eating and talking in a comfortable jumble of sweatered torsos and winterwear and elbows. When Capa and Cassie were nearly done with their food, a longhaired woman in a shapeless charcoal sweater and old jeans perched herself with a guitar on a tall stool in a corner across the room and began to play and sing.
She had a sweet, limber voice. The room quieted. Capa sat transfixed. His face was focused but peaceful; his eyes seemed to fill with soft blue light. Cassie went and got them more tea. Then she simply sat with him and listened.
*****
When they left the Treehugger, the moon was up. It glared down from the blue-black sky, a three-quarters disc in chalky white wearing a corona of ice crystals. The stars glittered from a safe distance. It was very cold.
They ended up back at Capa’s dorm. It was in a quieter, older building than hers, and the powers-that-be had given him more space. He was up three flights of badly lit wooden stairs. The elevator hadn’t worked properly, he said, for years. Neither of them minded, of course. He was just looking for something to say. His blue-sky eyes had gone all shy when he’d held the outer door for her.
She noted the equally shy half-smile he tried to hide as he swiped his inside keycard, and she felt herself shyly half-smile back while a tingling having nothing to do with sweet-potato soup burred through her belly, and then she half wondered what she was doing here with him.
Sometimes she hated civilians. Men like Mace she understood. She liked Mace. The idea-- Do me and you’ve done me-- they both could subscribe to that. Capa was something other. Her military way of thinking broke him down simply and bleakly: He was too intelligent for his own good. Moreover, he had to be too intelligent for the sake of everyone else. Mace was smart and practical. Uncomplicated. Capa possessed a core of discipline like a thick twisting of copper wire. He had a hard, lean body; he exercised it regularly; Mace said (and she agreed) that he’d be a devil in a fight. But he might get himself killed crossing a street.
Very simply-- in the ninety seconds from the icewater clarity of the night air to the relative warmth of his rooms, she could tell: his complexities were entangling her. What was worse, she didn’t mind.
She kept seeking comparisons as he took her jacket. Her only difficulty with Mace had come about a week ago. They had a rule, and it was simple: We need our sleep, so we don’t sleep together. So last week on an unspecified day, at or around oh-two-thirty hours, as Mace mumbled “G’night, Cass” and rolled over toward the wall and commenced snoring, she’d pulled on her clothes and her boots and her parka and gone out the door. Of her own dorm.
She had to fumble for her keycard. Then she nearly rugburned her hand smacking his crewcut. “sshole--!”
Mace rolled over, laughing. “Sorry-- sorry: Okay, I’m going. I’m going--!”
Maybe she smiled slightly. Or blushed slightly. At any rate, he caught her remembering it. Capa. Right here, right now, watching her with his eyes like that final edge of blue between the sky and space.
He said, flatly: “We’re making a mistake.”
Abruptly, that unspecified day of last week was gone. She found herself very much in the present.
“Do you want me to agree?” she asked him.
We’ll get it out of our systems, she thought. At worst, by the time the mission is truly underway, we’ll be exes, comfortable or not. She thought it again, just for emphasis, just to know if he could read her thoughts: sometimes she hated civilians. Complicating situations that didn’t need complicating.
And sometimes--
One thing not complex, one thing that could strike her directly, right in the heart: his smile. It struck her now.
“No,” he said.
He hung up her coat, and they went amiably through the preliminaries. Coffee? No. Music? Yes. Ancient Brian Eno, providing a quiet soundtrack to a slow, sweeping look at his place and his furniture (secondhand but solid and comfortable) and the things on his walls. A Soviet-era space poster. A photograph of his sister, as fine-boned and clear-eyed and pale as her brother. Her son. A touch-board covered in numbers, papers covered in numbers, too. Quiet talk, about families, the music they’d just heard at the ‘hugger, about anything but the mission-- more especially about anything but the morning and the lab and how he’d woken. Then he touched her, drew her to him gently by the waist, moved her hair away and kissed her neck, and the preliminaries ended.
*****
Still-- and this was a time and touching and unclothing later-- she wasn’t completely in the present. Another part of her code with Mace came to her: a simple question.
“Could you let me die?” she’d asked him.
“If I had to, yeah,” Mace replied. “And you’d do the same for me.”
“Yeah.”
She asked now almost without intending to-- as grotesque an example of timing as there could have been-- right as Capa was stretching out beside her on the bed he’d just unmade for them. He frowned slightly-- not at her, she realized, but at the question. He touched her cheek.
“If you died knowing that I loved you.”
It wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear. Something ached suddenly in her throat. She reached for the light, and he leaned across her and put his hand on her arm. He nuzzled her. “Leave it, Cass.”
*****
Later, though, as she came out of a doze, the light was out. And Capa wasn’t with her. His side of the bed was empty; the rumpled sheet was cool.
For a moment, she was disoriented-- possibly, still, an aftereffect of the hibernation drugs: had he really been with her at all? She looked beyond the bed. The room was filled with a blend of shadow and pale deep blue light; it was coming from the window, where the curtain had been pulled to the side. Then she saw: he was standing there, nude, looking out at the moon.
“Capa--?”
He didn’t turn. His voice was dreamy: “Still reflects so much light.”
She got up. It was cold. She padded over to him, brushed fingers through his hair. “Are you okay?”
“Sure.”
She paused, the air tingling on her skin. “Haven’t been around women much, have you?”
“Was it that bad?”
“What-- Oh.” She blushed, realizing; she chuckled. “No. No. Really. It’s always-- I’m not very good at this kind of thing. It’s just that guys have always tried harder to lie to me.” She slipped her arms around his slender torso, pressed up to him from behind. “When I ask you if you’re okay, you don’t have to say ‘yes’ if it’s not true.”
“Could you fix it, though? If I weren’t okay-- could you fix me?”
“Probably not. But I can listen.”
“You can be here.”
“That, too.”
“Maybe that’s enough.”
A moment. She slid her hands up and across his chest and held him by the shoulders, hugging herself closer to him. She pressed her lips to a freckle on his pale skin, laid her cheek against his shoulder blade. Capa lifted one of her hands to his mouth, brushed his lips across her knuckles. Then she felt him shiver. “Christ, Cass-- you’re freezing.”
“We’re freezing.” She caught his hand in hers, kept her eyes on his as he turned to her. He gave her the slightest of smiles, and she smiled back. He looked like an angel, tender and remote. “Come on back to bed.”
They resettled. Renestled in the sheets and blankets, face to face. He kissed her, a little apologetically; she kissed him back, and the apology melted away. She drew him closer; Capa pressed up to her; she embraced him with her legs as well as her arms, and all the heat they’d lost at the window was returning, flowing between them--
-- and he hesitated. Frustration in his eyes. Fear as well. She lay still; she held him gently, carefully. He traced fingers through the hair near her right temple.
“Do you want to know what I dreamed?” he asked quietly. “In the lab?”
“Tell me.”
“I dreamt that I was the sun and that I was dying.”
More than cold: a sudden pocket of hollowness deep inside her. “Go on.”
“Darkness around me, in all directions. Palpable. Cold. So impossibly fcking cold. Like I was made of heat and light and I was throwing myself against it, holding it back. And I could feel myself failing. Like something I’d been lifting that I couldn’t lift anymore. I could feel-- It was inside me. The darkness. It got inside me, and it was poisoning me from the inside out. I was collapsing inward-- but I wasn’t: the blackness had weight and density, and it was crushing me. Until finally I couldn’t tell where I ended and the darkness began. My sight was going-- or my light was. The same thing. It was like it got in behind my eyes-- I could feel myself going. All the same. All that fcking blackness entering me. Inside me. And the cold-- Oh, fck--”
“Shh-- Capa, Capa: shh--” Cassie drew his head down to her shoulder, took his weight, held him. He lay against her, shaking. She waited, waited longer, patiently. Finally his breathing eased. He began to relax.
But then he murmured, near her right ear: “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I’m here because you’re fcking insane.”
“It’s probably true.”
“Ask me if I care.”
“Cass--”
“They pumped us full of semi-experimental drugs and stuck us in senso-dep tanks. Some of us could handle it; some of us couldn’t. Deal with it, Robert.”
“The mission would have been easier--”
“Bullsht.” She shifted beneath him, wrapped him more comfortably in her arms. “Do you want to know what would have scared the hell out of me?”
He asked softly: “What?”
“Knowing that I was going to be ninety million miles from home waiting for a wake-up call from some dmn computer. I’m glad we’re not sleeping it. I hate that you dreamed what you did. If I could, I’d-- But I’m glad we’re not sleeping.”
He raised his head, looked into her eyes. She hadn’t lied; now she had nothing to hide. She met his gaze evenly. He touched her lips--
“Right now,” he said, “I am, too.”
He kissed her. Cassie welcomed his mouth with hers. And, for the time being, they stayed awake.
*****
SLEEPERS
Capa woke up crying. They all saw. He didn’t seem to mind them seeing: more than the fact that they considered him a friend or at least a close colleague and were honestly concerned for him, he seemed genuinely unaware of their noticing. Not that any of them initially were in any condition, really, to notice anything.
Mace, for example, first saw Capa crying only because their chambers in the lab were side by side. Mace woke aware most intensely of the brilliance of the white light filling his eyes; he was secondarily most aware of the rushing in his ears, which he realized after fifteen dull seconds of simply sitting was the blood cascading through the arteries in his neck. All of them were sitting up, in their white skivvies, swaying slightly to the unfamiliar everyday flows and rhythms of their own bodies. Capa was on Mace’s left; Cassie was to Capa’s left. Mace dully watched her raise her hands slowly to her temples. On her face was a look of drunken concentration, teetering at the edge of frustration. She looked his way.
“Whoa,” he mouthed at her.
Then he nodded toward Capa. Cassie turned her head slowly to look. Capa was sitting with his hands in his lap. His shoulders were loose, his blue-glass eyes half-closed. Tears were running down his cheeks.
“Capa--?” Mace said hoarsely. “Hey, man. Capa?”
Capa looked toward him. “Mace.”
“You okay?”
Capa licked his lips. He wasn’t making eye contact.
“I’m cold,” he said.
*****
“I love this part,” said Jeff Lasky.
The supervising head of mission services for the Icarus II Project was a man sized for an earlier century, lean and narrow-shouldered in his gray lab coat. His eyes were a pale watery blue; his features were vague if once handsome, as though someone had taken an unfocused picture of his face from years ago and stuck it over his face. His forehead was high; faded golden hair hung in wisps like spindrift on the top of his head. The holobadge on his lapel titled him “Doctor.” Through a wall of one-way glass, he was watching the crew of the Icarus II wake from compressed cryo-sleep. Compressed in that, through the administration of a c[o]cktail of semi-experimental chemicals and subsequent slumber in modified sensory-deprivation tanks, the six men and two women of the Icarus II had experienced in the space of an early morning and afternoon roughly the equivalent of eight months’ deep unconsciousness. Now they were waking.
To his left, Daniel Monroe, who was, as Lasky liked to quip, Lasky’s “left hand of God” when it came to project rank and who wore also a lab coat and the label “Doctor,” looked through the dark glass at the crew of the Icarus II, struggling through various stages of helpless stillness to re-orient themselves to the conscious world. He was quite Lasky’s opposite in terms of build-- he’d had the childhood nickname “Ape,” and he could still hear its echoes, even through a cladding of muscle and tidy grooming and academic degrees-- and in terms of outlook as well. He muttered: “That’s because you’re a fcking sadist.”
“Say something, Dan?” Dr. Lasky asked mildly.
“No.”
“Looks like Dr. Capa is having trouble.”
Capa was standing with a hand over his face. His head was down; his shoulders were shaking in countermotion to the deep breaths he was drawing into and shoving from his lungs. Monroe glanced at the man’s readings on the instrument bank to his right. Vitals good. But he looked crushed somehow. He’d been a model of modulated energy when he’d arrived with the others; he bordered on “delicate” in terms of build and was deceptively young-looking, but he’d been buoying himself along seemingly on a combination of bright-eyed quick focus and wiry muscle. Now he looked like a little boy. The two in the crew who were most obviously his friends, the slight dark-haired woman called Cassidy and the most military-looking of the men, Mace, were with him. Capa pulled his hand down to his jaw. He was scowling at something, not at them; Monroe heard his flat voice through the burble on the intercom: “I’m alright. I’m fine.”
Then Monroe realized: He’s scowling at the tears in his eyes. The doctor frowned. “He’s crying.”
“Looks like we’ve got a washout,” Lasky said. “Got another one right there." He pointed at the glass, toward the opposite side of the room, where the Icarus’ doctor, Searle, was standing beside his chamber, not moving, not blinking. He was swaying slightly on his feet. Next to him were the crew’s botanist, the woman Corazon, and Trey, the ship’s navigator. Corazon laid a hand on Searle’s left bicep, and even from twenty feet away, Monroe saw a shudder rumble its way through the doctor’s strongly built frame. Searle grimaced; he gingerly removed Corazon’s hand from his arm.
“Please don’t. Don’t do that,” he said. A concerned frown settled on Corazon’s clean-boned face; she let her hand drop to her side.
Next to Monroe, behind the glass, Lasky smiled. “Let’s get started on the debriefings, shall we?”
*****
First, though, came detox. A tech with a high forehead and a young but pinched face entered the lab bearing a tray holding eight large plastic cups. Inside the cups was a mossy-colored semi-liquid that looked like it had been scraped from dock pilings.
“You folks are scheduled for debriefing,” he said to Kaneda and his crew. “First, though, you have to drink this. All of it. There are bathrooms there and there--” -- and he nodded to the ends of the lab. “Extra ones in the hall.”
“Why do we need to know that?” Trey asked.
“I think we’re about to find out,” Corazon said.
Doubtful looks all around. Kaneda took the first glass, his hand shaking slightly, and raised it to the others.
“To your health. Ladies. Gentlemen.”
*****
What did you dream?
Sometimes it was simple. The military types were the easiest with whom to deal. They were typically straightforward; said straightforwardness usually permeated every aspect of their lives. Even their dreams.
For instance, Mace. He lounged back on the sofa in Monroe’s office, stretched, put a hand behind his head. “Stars. I’m lying on my back in a field of long grass. Warm night. Insects buzzing, but nothing’s biting me. No mosquitoes. I can smell the grass. Sweet, y’know? Spicy, kinda. And I’m counting stars. Like diamond chips up in the sky.”
“Is anyone with you, Mr. Mace?”
Mace looked at him and grinned slyly. “That’d be telling, sir.”
*****
Or Cassidy:
“I’m running,” she said.
“What are you running from, Miss Cassidy?” Monroe asked.
“Nothing. I’m running toward-- I’m not sure.”
“Is it something good or something bad?”
“Good. Definitely good. I’m running on a trail through a forest. Sunlight through the leaves. And the sun is--” She smiled. “You know how kids do those drawings--? Like the sun is smiling?”
“Could you stop running if you wanted to?”
“Yes. But I don’t want to. I mean, I feel fine. I can feel my breath in my lungs and my heart beating. I can feel the trail beneath my shoes-- and they’re my favorite old runners-- and the sun’s on my hair and shoulders, and the wind’s in my face-- and it’s perfect. Just-- perfect.”
*****
But things weren’t as simple with the others. Nor as perfect. When all of his crew had finished debriefing and dressing, Kaneda met them in the reception area outside the lab.
“We will not be sleeping our way to the sun,” he said.
“Why not?” Harvey asked.
“Two of us reacted less than optimally to the procedure.”
Mace spoke: “Did they say who?”
“That information is confidential, Mr. Mace.” Kaneda looked around at his crew, the barest hint of troubling on his bearded face. “For the remainder of the day, we are to rest. The procedure may leave us with residual disorientation. Doctors Lasky and Monroe suggest that we forgo our mission-related duties until tomorrow.”
*****
For people given a day off-- such as remained of this day-- they were surprisingly sober as they walked the long hall leading out of the mission health center. Capa stalked on ahead, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his parka. The others followed. Mace touched Cassie’s arm, slowed his pace. She slowed with him.
“So who do you think flipped out?” he asked.
“Not us.”
“Goes without saying.”
“Searle. He’s wound too tight.”
“My thought, too. Who else?”
Cassie hesitated. Mace followed her line of sight to Capa’s hunched shoulders.
“Maybe you should go after him,” he said. “Stick with him for a while.”
She glanced at him wryly. “Yes, sir.”
Mace smiled. “Like you’ll be suffering.”
*****
Trey watched Cassie join Capa, watched him acknowledge her with a slight smile and a smattering if not of pleasure then of relief. They walked off together, not touching, certainly not holding hands. Still, Trey had to try not to look mortified. He failed. He felt it in his gut like a sputtering hot backwash of that awful detoxifier.
Said Harvey, at his side: “Maybe she’ll be a triple-timer. You never know.”
“Shut up.” Trey sounded harsher than he meant to; he was having a hard time shaking his unsteadiness. It felt as if it were broadcasting from his midriff: not nausea, exactly, nor fear. Something between the two.
“Oh, come on,” said Harvey-- and Trey caught a slight quaver in his voice-- “We’re all gonna be village bicycles by the time this is over.”
“You’re married.”
“It’s nearly a three-year mission. Things can happen.”
“Your wife okay with that?”
If he sounded bitter, Harvey didn’t seem to mind. He was a good man that way, Harvey was. “We’ve talked. There’s things we-- She understands.”
“Wish we could’ve slept it.”
“Well, we can’t.”
They were back at the dorms, lingering in the old comfortable early evening dimness of the common area, when Trey finally asked: “Do you think it was me? One of the ones who cracked?”
“Should I think it was you?”
“No.” Trey chose and arranged his next words carefully. “See-- it wasn’t this. The sleep thing. But I’m wondering how much all of these doctors know about us. I told someone something at our first psych screenings--”
Harvey smiled. “What? That you’re a hacker map geek?”
“No. That I was doing it for my cat.”
“It--? You mean the mission.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll pray for you.” Harvey shook his head at Trey’s questioning look. “Nothing personal. It’s a Lutheran thing. We pray for people.”
“Really.”
“Yeah, really.”
“Pray for my cat, then.”
“Okay: I’ll pray for your cat.”
Trey smiled, a little sheepishly. “Thanks.”
From the direction of the kitchen, Mace approached, carrying a cup of something that smelled like either coffee or motor oil. He blew steam from the surface, sipped. “You guys doing alright?”
Harvey and Trey exchanged looks; they both looked toward Searle, who was sprawled on the sofa with a reader screen propped on his chest. He seemed to be looking right through it.
“I, umm--” Trey frowned, considering. “I don’t want to be alone right now.”
Mace said to him while following Trey’s worried look to the doctor on the sofa: “Do you know how gay that sounds?”
“Yeah, I do. And I don’t care.”
“I know what you mean, man,” Harvey said.
Mace looked at him. “Your old lady coming in tonight?”
“No. Next weekend.”
“What say we bowl a few games, grab a couple beers?”
“At that place in--” Trey snorted. “Man, that’s a dive.”
“Naw, it’ll be fun. Maybe we’ll get in a bar fight.” Mace called toward the sofa: “You in, Searle?”
Searle shut off the screen and sat up. He looked as though he’d been asleep. “What about Capa and Cassie?”
Trey tried not to sound resentful. He very nearly succeeded. “Think they’re, uh, getting in some quality time.”
Mace pasted on a grin. “Like we’d need Brainiac in a fight anyway.”
Searle stood. “I was thinking of Cassie.” He seemed to thaw as he spoke. “Those little Air Force gals, they’re fierce.”
*****
The fierce one and her quiet charge, meanwhile, had strolled their way to the Treehugger Cafe, the most militantly vegetarian restaurant for three hundred miles, if one were to believe the mantra topping the blackboard that served as a menu. When Capa suggested the place, Cassie’s gut response was an instantaneous and almost primordial craving for a hamburger-- and she could almost hear Mace laughing: “So Brainiac dragged you to the Dirtweed Express!” But she kept her cravings and imaginings to herself. Rare enough to see Capa eat on a good day; his suggesting food of any kind after his trauma this afternoon was a very positive sign.
They descended a treacherous flight of open-backed stairs into a cramped but clean and warm dining area not unlike a cave where they sat on indifferently legged chairs at a heavy wooden table and ate sweet potato and apple and ginger soup and tore and dunked chunks of herb bread and drank green tea from old stoneware mugs. People sat around them, students mostly, eating and talking in a comfortable jumble of sweatered torsos and winterwear and elbows. When Capa and Cassie were nearly done with their food, a longhaired woman in a shapeless charcoal sweater and old jeans perched herself with a guitar on a tall stool in a corner across the room and began to play and sing.
She had a sweet, limber voice. The room quieted. Capa sat transfixed. His face was focused but peaceful; his eyes seemed to fill with soft blue light. Cassie went and got them more tea. Then she simply sat with him and listened.
*****
When they left the Treehugger, the moon was up. It glared down from the blue-black sky, a three-quarters disc in chalky white wearing a corona of ice crystals. The stars glittered from a safe distance. It was very cold.
They ended up back at Capa’s dorm. It was in a quieter, older building than hers, and the powers-that-be had given him more space. He was up three flights of badly lit wooden stairs. The elevator hadn’t worked properly, he said, for years. Neither of them minded, of course. He was just looking for something to say. His blue-sky eyes had gone all shy when he’d held the outer door for her.
She noted the equally shy half-smile he tried to hide as he swiped his inside keycard, and she felt herself shyly half-smile back while a tingling having nothing to do with sweet-potato soup burred through her belly, and then she half wondered what she was doing here with him.
Sometimes she hated civilians. Men like Mace she understood. She liked Mace. The idea-- Do me and you’ve done me-- they both could subscribe to that. Capa was something other. Her military way of thinking broke him down simply and bleakly: He was too intelligent for his own good. Moreover, he had to be too intelligent for the sake of everyone else. Mace was smart and practical. Uncomplicated. Capa possessed a core of discipline like a thick twisting of copper wire. He had a hard, lean body; he exercised it regularly; Mace said (and she agreed) that he’d be a devil in a fight. But he might get himself killed crossing a street.
Very simply-- in the ninety seconds from the icewater clarity of the night air to the relative warmth of his rooms, she could tell: his complexities were entangling her. What was worse, she didn’t mind.
She kept seeking comparisons as he took her jacket. Her only difficulty with Mace had come about a week ago. They had a rule, and it was simple: We need our sleep, so we don’t sleep together. So last week on an unspecified day, at or around oh-two-thirty hours, as Mace mumbled “G’night, Cass” and rolled over toward the wall and commenced snoring, she’d pulled on her clothes and her boots and her parka and gone out the door. Of her own dorm.
She had to fumble for her keycard. Then she nearly rugburned her hand smacking his crewcut. “sshole--!”
Mace rolled over, laughing. “Sorry-- sorry: Okay, I’m going. I’m going--!”
Maybe she smiled slightly. Or blushed slightly. At any rate, he caught her remembering it. Capa. Right here, right now, watching her with his eyes like that final edge of blue between the sky and space.
He said, flatly: “We’re making a mistake.”
Abruptly, that unspecified day of last week was gone. She found herself very much in the present.
“Do you want me to agree?” she asked him.
We’ll get it out of our systems, she thought. At worst, by the time the mission is truly underway, we’ll be exes, comfortable or not. She thought it again, just for emphasis, just to know if he could read her thoughts: sometimes she hated civilians. Complicating situations that didn’t need complicating.
And sometimes--
One thing not complex, one thing that could strike her directly, right in the heart: his smile. It struck her now.
“No,” he said.
He hung up her coat, and they went amiably through the preliminaries. Coffee? No. Music? Yes. Ancient Brian Eno, providing a quiet soundtrack to a slow, sweeping look at his place and his furniture (secondhand but solid and comfortable) and the things on his walls. A Soviet-era space poster. A photograph of his sister, as fine-boned and clear-eyed and pale as her brother. Her son. A touch-board covered in numbers, papers covered in numbers, too. Quiet talk, about families, the music they’d just heard at the ‘hugger, about anything but the mission-- more especially about anything but the morning and the lab and how he’d woken. Then he touched her, drew her to him gently by the waist, moved her hair away and kissed her neck, and the preliminaries ended.
*****
Still-- and this was a time and touching and unclothing later-- she wasn’t completely in the present. Another part of her code with Mace came to her: a simple question.
“Could you let me die?” she’d asked him.
“If I had to, yeah,” Mace replied. “And you’d do the same for me.”
“Yeah.”
She asked now almost without intending to-- as grotesque an example of timing as there could have been-- right as Capa was stretching out beside her on the bed he’d just unmade for them. He frowned slightly-- not at her, she realized, but at the question. He touched her cheek.
“If you died knowing that I loved you.”
It wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear. Something ached suddenly in her throat. She reached for the light, and he leaned across her and put his hand on her arm. He nuzzled her. “Leave it, Cass.”
*****
Later, though, as she came out of a doze, the light was out. And Capa wasn’t with her. His side of the bed was empty; the rumpled sheet was cool.
For a moment, she was disoriented-- possibly, still, an aftereffect of the hibernation drugs: had he really been with her at all? She looked beyond the bed. The room was filled with a blend of shadow and pale deep blue light; it was coming from the window, where the curtain had been pulled to the side. Then she saw: he was standing there, nude, looking out at the moon.
“Capa--?”
He didn’t turn. His voice was dreamy: “Still reflects so much light.”
She got up. It was cold. She padded over to him, brushed fingers through his hair. “Are you okay?”
“Sure.”
She paused, the air tingling on her skin. “Haven’t been around women much, have you?”
“Was it that bad?”
“What-- Oh.” She blushed, realizing; she chuckled. “No. No. Really. It’s always-- I’m not very good at this kind of thing. It’s just that guys have always tried harder to lie to me.” She slipped her arms around his slender torso, pressed up to him from behind. “When I ask you if you’re okay, you don’t have to say ‘yes’ if it’s not true.”
“Could you fix it, though? If I weren’t okay-- could you fix me?”
“Probably not. But I can listen.”
“You can be here.”
“That, too.”
“Maybe that’s enough.”
A moment. She slid her hands up and across his chest and held him by the shoulders, hugging herself closer to him. She pressed her lips to a freckle on his pale skin, laid her cheek against his shoulder blade. Capa lifted one of her hands to his mouth, brushed his lips across her knuckles. Then she felt him shiver. “Christ, Cass-- you’re freezing.”
“We’re freezing.” She caught his hand in hers, kept her eyes on his as he turned to her. He gave her the slightest of smiles, and she smiled back. He looked like an angel, tender and remote. “Come on back to bed.”
They resettled. Renestled in the sheets and blankets, face to face. He kissed her, a little apologetically; she kissed him back, and the apology melted away. She drew him closer; Capa pressed up to her; she embraced him with her legs as well as her arms, and all the heat they’d lost at the window was returning, flowing between them--
-- and he hesitated. Frustration in his eyes. Fear as well. She lay still; she held him gently, carefully. He traced fingers through the hair near her right temple.
“Do you want to know what I dreamed?” he asked quietly. “In the lab?”
“Tell me.”
“I dreamt that I was the sun and that I was dying.”
More than cold: a sudden pocket of hollowness deep inside her. “Go on.”
“Darkness around me, in all directions. Palpable. Cold. So impossibly fcking cold. Like I was made of heat and light and I was throwing myself against it, holding it back. And I could feel myself failing. Like something I’d been lifting that I couldn’t lift anymore. I could feel-- It was inside me. The darkness. It got inside me, and it was poisoning me from the inside out. I was collapsing inward-- but I wasn’t: the blackness had weight and density, and it was crushing me. Until finally I couldn’t tell where I ended and the darkness began. My sight was going-- or my light was. The same thing. It was like it got in behind my eyes-- I could feel myself going. All the same. All that fcking blackness entering me. Inside me. And the cold-- Oh, fck--”
“Shh-- Capa, Capa: shh--” Cassie drew his head down to her shoulder, took his weight, held him. He lay against her, shaking. She waited, waited longer, patiently. Finally his breathing eased. He began to relax.
But then he murmured, near her right ear: “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I’m here because you’re fcking insane.”
“It’s probably true.”
“Ask me if I care.”
“Cass--”
“They pumped us full of semi-experimental drugs and stuck us in senso-dep tanks. Some of us could handle it; some of us couldn’t. Deal with it, Robert.”
“The mission would have been easier--”
“Bullsht.” She shifted beneath him, wrapped him more comfortably in her arms. “Do you want to know what would have scared the hell out of me?”
He asked softly: “What?”
“Knowing that I was going to be ninety million miles from home waiting for a wake-up call from some dmn computer. I’m glad we’re not sleeping it. I hate that you dreamed what you did. If I could, I’d-- But I’m glad we’re not sleeping.”
He raised his head, looked into her eyes. She hadn’t lied; now she had nothing to hide. She met his gaze evenly. He touched her lips--
“Right now,” he said, “I am, too.”
He kissed her. Cassie welcomed his mouth with hers. And, for the time being, they stayed awake.
*****