“You’re just pissed because I meddled with your fiefdom. Well, I don’t have to respond to the challenge of a single individual-”
“Venus is right,” Wilson said. He had been sitting on a microgravity T-stool, his legs wrapped around its struts. Now he straightened up so he faced Kelly himself.
Kelly stared. “Wilson? What are you doing?”
“Kelly, you’ve done a great job. But things have been off course for a while. Not keeping to the cleanup rotas-we wouldn’t be in this mess if not for that.” He gestured at Thomas. “And you sure got this wrong. This isn’t a road we can go down. You need to let somebody else take this burden off your shoulders.”
“Like who? You?” But he didn’t back down. Kelly’s face worked, her eyes hard yet red-rimmed, as if she might cry. “You bastard, Wilson. You’re betraying me. Did you set this up? Cook it up between you behind my back?”
Wilson spread his hands. “We’re just two crew members expressing an opinion.”
“Fine. If that’s what you want. I stand down.” She folded her arms and pushed herself back, so she drifted between Masayo and Thomas.
There was another long silence. Nobody moved.
Holle realized that Kelly hadn’t just given up her post as speaker, she’d abandoned chairing this meeting too. As an instinctive backroom worker Holle didn’t like to be personally exposed in this kind of charged atmosphere. But she was always prodded by duty, duty. If nobody else shoveled the shit, she would. Even literally, sometimes.
She pulled herself into the space Kelly had vacated. “We need to move on. Anybody object if I chair the meeting from here on in?”
There was a rumble of assent. Crucially, Kelly, Venus and Wilson all nodded. But Wilson sneered. “That’s typical of you, Groundwater. Why aren’t you up here challenging yourself? Pointless little mouse.”
Holle ignored him. “Let’s wrap this up as quickly as possible. We need a new speaker. Can I have a show of candidates? Raise your hand if you want to put yourself forward.”
Kelly’s arm snapped up.
Venus raised her hand, grave.
And then, slowly, as if reluctantly, as if his arm was being dragged up, Wilson raised his right hand. Kelly shot him a look of sheer loathing.
Holle proceeded cautiously. “OK. Kelly Kenzie, Venus Jenning, Wilson Argent, all declare their interest. But not all the crew is here.” She glanced up at the nearest camera. “Grace, you’re in the cupola?”
Grace Gray was on watch today. Her voice boomed from the PA. “Here, Holle. We see you. Helen says hi.”
Holle grinned. “I wish I was in there with you,” she said ruefully. “Grace, please send a message out through Seba, and over to Halivah. Anybody who wants to declare their candidacy for this post should show themselves now.” She looked up into the nearest camera. “Guys, everybody, let’s be thorough about this. We don’t want any second-guessing. If your neighbor is sleeping wake him up, and don’t let him miss his chance. I’ll allow fifteen minutes for responses. Everybody comfortable with that?” She glanced around again. There were no objections.
It was the longest fifteen minutes in Holle’s life, at least since she’d waited on the pad at Gunnison for a nuclear bomb to go off under her butt. Everybody on Deck Ten stayed where they were, silent as stones.
After the fifteen minutes there were no more candidates, to Holle’s relief.
“OK,” she said. “Then I guess we proceed to the choice itself. How do you want to do this-a show of hands? Grace, if you can keep track of what’s happening in Halivah-”
“No,” said Wilson. He spoke strongly and clearly. “This is too important a decision to screw around with. It’s not like when we left Jupiter, when we didn’t have any serious divisions over policy, any personal splits. Now there’s an argument to be had.”
“Then what do you propose?”
“That we take our time. Say, a week. What’s the rush? In that interval Holle can stand as acting speaker. In that time we will have a chance to debate where we’re going as a crew, as a community. And then we can hold a proper election.”
Neither Venus nor Kelly looked happy, but neither was objecting out loud.
“OK. So at the end of the week, then what? We gather for a vote by acclamation?”
“Hell, no. We have a secret ballot. We can find some way to manage that. I suggest we have two rounds-eliminate third place, have a runoff between the top two-”
Kelly snorted. “A secret ballot? You’d really condone such a waste of resources?”
Wilson looked back at her steadily, then significantly at Masayo. “There has to be no intimidation. A secret ballot is the way to ensure that.”
He carried the day. And when the wider group broke up, chattering with excitement, Holle kept the three of them back, Kelly, Venus and Wilson, with Grace watching remotely as a witness, to thrash out a basic schedule for the coming week. Kelly and Wilson stayed apart, and wouldn’t even look at each other.
Then, when it was done, hugely relieved, Holle fled to the calm and silence of her cabin where she began the business of picking up Kelly’s workload, and figuring how she was going to juggle it with her own responsibilities.
But Wilson Argent came knocking on the door. “We need to talk. I need your vote-for all our sakes.”
66
“Make yourself comfortable on the couch,” Wetherbee said. Zane, restrained by a loosely fastened belt, was in a foldout couch in Wetherbee’s surgery on Halivah, the one on Seba still being out of action. He said, “It’s hard not to be comfortable in free fall, Doctor.”
Wetherbee bit back on his irritation. This was the alter, the partial personality, that he had tentatively labeled Zane 3, the passive, shadowy, depressive relic left behind when the other alters had taken away their various loads of guilt and responsibility. But even Zane 3 was a smartass. He kept his tone moderate. “You know what we’re going to do, the hypnotic procedure?”
“It’s not a problem. It’s worked for us before. You may know I was noted as readily hypnotizable back in the Academy.”
“So you were.” And in fact a willingness to submit to hypnotic commands was, Wetherbee had learned, a characteristic of people with Zane’s peculiar disorder. “So let’s begin. Take deep slow breaths. Feel the tension washing out of your arms, your hands, your feet. Let your shoulders relax, your neck. Let your head just float. You’re falling gently, falling inside yourself. Deeper and deeper you go, you’re more and more relaxed. You find yourself in the Academy, in your cabin, the old museum building in Denver…” With his father close by, long before the damaging serial abuse by Harry Smith had started and the flood was still a remote threat, Zane had felt as safe in the DMNS as he had ever felt in his life. Now Wetherbee returned him there, to that place and time, as a secure place to begin his analysis.
“What can you see?”
“My handheld, my books, my sports stuff. My AxysCorp coveralls. We’re supposed to go on a hike tomorrow.”
“OK. Now look around, Zane. Can you see that special door we talked about? The extra one, that leads into the other room.”
“I see it. It’s open.”
“Good. Good.” The “door” had always been closed before, and sometimes locked. “Can you see through the doorway? What do you see?”
“People.”
“How many? Who are they?”
“There is a boy, and kind of a young man, and an older man.”
“All right. Do you think any of them would like to speak to me?”
“I think the older man. He’s smiling and nodding.”
“Can you describe him?”
“He’s about my height. He’s a little bulky. He has silver hair and glasses.”
Wetherbee was pretty certain this was the alter called Jerry. The description closely matched Zane’s father, as did the name-“Jerry” for “Jerzy.” Zane was a smartass, but not always very inventive in the details of his alters.
“Would you let the man talk to me? You just have to step back a bit.”