He volunteered to chop vegetables. He took out his intensity on onions and carrots and broccoli and had a cup of coffee. The first fruit of the “season” was in so he made a salad, following Carlotta’s directions, composing a light, spicy sesame oil for it. The first citrus had come ripe the day before, greeted by a little ritual. Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges had rolled over the witnessing crowd, echoing in the cavern. Someone had salted the clouds that formed on the axis, so that crimson and jade streamers coasted in ghostly straight lines overhead, up the spine of the ship.
Finally, at a lull he said, “I just heard the news.”
“Oh,” Nikka said, understanding.
“Why didn’t you tell me you’d volunteered for the satellite mission?”
“Volunteer? I didn’t. I’m on the list for rotating assignments.”
“They thought it was better for morale,” Carlotta put in, “if we just let the personnel optimization program pick the mission crew. Fairer, too.”
“Oh, yes, we must be fair, mustn’t we? A fabulously stupid idea,” he said.
“Everybody’s dying to get out of the ship,” Carlotta said.
“It might well turn out precisely that way,” he said sourly.
Nikka said, “I thought it was better if I simply let the news come up as usual. I nearly told you before—”
“Well, then, nearly thank you.”
“It’s my chance to do something!”
“I don’t want you risking it.”
Nikka said defiantly, “I take my chances, just as you do.”
“You’ll be on the servo’d equipment, the manifest says.”
“Yes. Operating the mobile detectors.”
“How close to the satellite?”
“A few kilometers.”
“I don’t like it. Ted’s going ahead with this without thinking it through.”
Carlotta put down a whisk beater and said, “You can’t run Nikka’s life.”
He looked steadily at her. “And you cannot expect me not to care.”
“Madre! You really want to fight over this?” Carlotta asked.
“Diplomacy seems to have broken down.”
Nikka said mildly, “This mission is planned, there are backups, every contingency—”
“We’re blasted ignorant. Too ignorant.”
“The satellite rock looks to be about the same age as the last major craters on Isis, correct?” Nikka asked lightly, to soften matters.
“So?”
“It stands to reason they represent the last artifacts of EM technology. The two satellites, the superconductors in the village—that is all that remains.”
“Possible,” Nigel muttered. “Possible. But to understand Isis we’ve got to go carefully, start from scratch—”
“We’re scratching, that’s for sure,” Carlotta said.
“I do not want you to risk your life on an assumption.”
Carlotta’s face darkened. “God, you push things damned far. Are you really going to keep Nikka from doing the job she was born to do?”
Nigel opened his mouth to say, Look, this is a private thing between the two of us—and saw where that would lead.
“You may be a goddamn living monument,” Carlotta said, “but you can’t rule by authority. Not with us.”
Nigel blinked, thinking, She’s right. So easy to fall into that trap and
—suddenly saw how it was for Nikka, her mind shifting, restless, clotted with memories, reaching out toward him now with hands still moist from the cooking, the determined cast to the face, the firm lift in the stomach, a tight pull won from endless hours of exercise, keeping the machine ready so that she could still go out, the outstretched hands slick and webbed by age and brown liver spots, narrowing the space between them—
“You cannot fix me in amber,” she said.
“Or any of us, damn it,” Carlotta added.
To him Nikka’s face glowed with associated memories, shone in the spare kitchen with a receptive willingness.
“I … suppose you’re right.”
—It was 2034 again and he comes home in the warm Pasadena evening, putt-putting on a scooter. He clicks the lock open and slams the big oak door to announce himself, bounding up the staircase. In the white living room he calls out to her. Something chimes faintly in his ears. His steps ring on the brown Mexican tiles as he walks into the arched intersection of kitchen and dining nook. A woman’s spiked shoe lies on the tile. One shoe. Directly underneath the bedroom arch. He steps forward and the ringing in his ear grows. Into the bedroom. Look to the left. Alexandria lies still, facedown. Hands reaching out, clenched. Arms an ugly swollen red, where the disease was eating at her, would never stop eating—
He knew it then, saw her falling away into nothingness. The ambulance that shrieked through night mists, the antiseptic hospital, the terrible things done to her after—all that was coda to the symphonic life the two of them had shared, had tried to have with Shirley as well, yet the three-body problem had forever remained unsolved—
He saw abruptly that the fear of losing Alexandria had become part of him now. He had never recovered. With age, the fear of change seeped into him and blended with the losing of her. Nikka had now been with him longer than Alexandria had, and a mere hint of danger to her—
Nigel shook his head, letting the old, still-sharp images fade.
“Back with us?” Carlotta asked.
“I expect so,” he said unevenly.
Nikka studied him, understanding slowly coming into her face.
He said, “These things take a bit of time.”
Carlotta said, “I just won’t let you push her around.” She put her arms protectively around Nikka.
“Why does this conversation keep reminding me of the United Nations?”
“Well, it’s true.”
Nikka said to Carlotta, “Still, we each have some power over the other.”
“Not that kind.”
“All kinds,” Nigel said. “Thighs part before me like the Red Sea. Point is, what are the limits?”
“If I don’t stand up to you, you’ll just run right over her,” Carlotta said.
Nikka said mildly, “That depends on the circumstances.”
Nigel smiled. “I’m not the ambivalent type. ‘Do you always try to look on both sides of an issue, Mr. Walmsley?’ ‘Well, yes and no.’ Not my kind of thing.”
“Well, you’d better make it—”
“Oh, come on, you two. The crisis is past,” Nikka said.
“Indeed. Let’s eat. Get back to basics.”
Nikka said, “Some Red Sea later?”
“We’ll negotiate over dessert.”
Nine
The mission team deployed carefully around Satellite A. One-third stayed forty klicks away, with the heavy gear and comm packs. A third scouted the surface. They found nothing special, verified Fraser’s dating and cratering count, and reconned the entrance holes. The last third set up the recon machines, tested the dark openings for sensors and trip lines, and finally decided all was well. No murmur of electromagnetic life came from the holes; nothing responded to their elementary probings.
The machines went in, tentatively and quietly. They were blocked by a sealed passageway thirty-three meters inside the rocky crust. The robots were cramped in the passage as it narrowed down and could not find anything to free the seal. Two women went in to eyeball the situation. They attached monitors to the black ceramic seal and listened for acoustic signatures which might reveal a lock.