He had fought the end of his pain for many tendays now, but his grief followed its natural course like a healing wound. Finally even the itch would be gone and Theresa would truly be dead—and William—
He groaned softly, for he owed William so much more than he could give emotionally, now or ever.
With his grief knitting its torn edges, there would be nothing left to define him but the dreary nothingness at his core, more blank than any black between stars, a comfortable emptiness to fall into, a gentle negation and dissolution.
He thought he would gladly die if death were an end in itself and not something more.
What he would pray to, then, was a weak candle of hope: that in these horrible spans of contesting civilizations, there was something, somewhere, that oversaw and judged and sympathized; that was wise in a way they could not conceive of; that might, given a chance, intervene, however mysteriously.
Something that cradled and nurtured his dead loves in its bosom; but something that would also acknowledge his unworthiness and allow him a finality, an end.
He thought of the powerful orgasm with Paola, stronger by many degrees than he remembered experiencing with Theresa.
Confusion and stars. What a combination, he thought.
He encouraged the pain to return and let depression settle over him, until his heart seemed to slow, his eyelids drooped, and he was surrounded by a comfortable blanket of despair, so much more palpable than memory or responsibility or the day-to-day dreariness of shipboard life.
Nothing intervened.
Nothing cared.
In a way, that was reassuring. There could be an end to the universe's complexity, an end to the strife and confusion of intelligence.
In the middle of the sports and competitions, in the middle of Martin's despair, Rosa Sequoia disappeared.
Kimberly Quartz and Jeanette Snap Dragon found her naked and half-dead from thirst five days later. They brought her to the schoolroom. Ariel kneeled on the floor and gripped her hair, pulling her head back and forcing her to drink water. Her eyes wandered to fix on points between the people in the room. "What the hell are you doing?" Ariel asked.
Rosa smiled up at her, water leaking from her mouth, cracked lips bleeding sluggish drops. Her face was smeared with dried blood. She had bitten her lower lip. "It came again and touched me," she said. "I was dangerous. I might have hurt somebody."
Hans entered the schoolroom already in a rage and brushed Ariel aside. "Get up, damn you," he said. Rosa stood unsteadily, smelling sour, drips of dried blood on her breasts.
"Are you nuts?" Hans asked.
She shook her head, her shy smile opening the bites. They bled more freely.
Hans grabbed Rosa's arm, looked around the room for someone to come forward of the ten crew that had gathered. Ariel stepped up again, and Hans transferred the unresisting arm to her hands, as if passing a dog's leash. "Feed her and clean her up. She's confined to quarters. Jeanette, guard her door and make sure she doesn't come out."
"I should be telling stories later today," Rosa said meekly. "That's why I came back."
"You won't talk to anybody," Hans said. He brushed past them all, ridding himself of the mess with a backward wave of his hands.
Martin followed him from the schoolroom, anger piercing his gloom. "She's sick," he told Hans. "She's not responsible."
"I'm sick, too," Hans said. "We're all sick. But she's slicking crazy. What about you?" He whirled on Martin. "Christ, you mope like a goddamned snail. Harpal's no better. What in hell is going on?"
Martin said, "We've fallen into a hole."
"Then let's climb out of it, by God!"
"There is no god. I hope. No one listening to us."
Hans gave him a withering, pitying glare. "Rosa would disagree," he said sharply. "I'll bet she has God's business card in her overalls right now. Wherever her overalls are. " Hans shook his head vigorously. "Of all the women on this ship, shehas to shed her clothes when she feels a fit coming on." He stopped a few meters down the corridor, shoulders hunched as if Martin were about to throw something at him.
Martin had not moved, wrapped in a wonderfully thick and protective melancholy, feeling very little beyond the fixed anger at Hans.
Hans turned, frowning. "You say we're in a hole. We're losing it, aren't we?" he asked. "By damn, I will not let us lose it." He tipped an almost jaunty wave to Martin, and skipped up the corridor, whistling tunelessly.
Martin shivered as if with cold. He returned to the schoolroom. Rosa talked freely with the five who remained. Ariel had brought her a pair of overalls that did not fit. She looked ridiculous but she did not care.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I apologize for my condition. I couldn't even think. I was wired to a big generator. I wasn't human. My body didn't matter." She faced Martin, large powerful arms held out as if she might try to fly. "I felt so ugly before this. Now it just isn't important." The light went suddenly from her eyes and she seemed to collapse a couple of inches. "I'm really tired," she whispered, chin dropping to her chest. "Jeanette, please take me to my room. Hans is right. Don't let me out for a while, and don't let anybody but you—or Ariel—in to see me." She raised a hand and pointed at the three, including Martin. "You are my friends," she said.
"It's a very weak signal," Hakim said. He unveiled the analysis for Hans, Harpal, and Martin, all gathered in the Dawn Treader'snose. "With our remotes out, we could have picked it up months ago… Maybe even when we were orbiting Wormwood. But we weren't focusing in this direction…"
"All right," Hans said impatiently. "It's a ship. It's close to us. How close?"
"Four hundred billion kilometers. If we do not alter course, we will pass within a hundred billion kilometers. It is following a course similar to our own, but traveling much more slowly. It is not accelerating."
Hans said. "It seems odd to find such a needle in the haystack. Why is it close to our course?"
Hakim ventured no guesses.
"Maybe it's a reasonable course between the two stars," Harpal suggested. "Give or take a few hundred billion kilometers…"
"Bolsh," Hans said. "They could have swung wide either way. We came up out of the poles… a reasonable course would have been to use least-energy vectors between the planes of the ecliptic. What's our relative velocity?"
Hakim highlighted the figure on the chart: the difference in their velocities amounted to one quarter c, about seventy-five thousand kilometers per second.
"Even if we could change course, we wouldn't want to shed that much speed to rendezvous… We'll just have to pass in the night. You're sure it's a ship?"
"The dimensions are appropriate. It is less than a kilometer long. We were fortunate enough to get a star occultation."
Hans hummed faintly and rubbed his cheeks with his palms. "Why send out a signal? Why not just hide and get your work done? Whatever the work is…"
Nobody had an answer.
"Can we interpret the signal?"
"It is not language of a spoken variety. That much we know. It may be a series of numbers, perhaps coordinates."
"You mean, telling rescuers where it is?"
"I think not. If these pulses are numbers, they are repetitive… There are about a hundred such groups of numbers, assuming that a long pause—a few microseconds—means a new group. Giacomo and Jennifer are working on the possibilities now."