He had a brother in South Carolina, a sister in Savannah. She’d met the sister, years ago. She wished it were possible to communicate with them, let them know. She’d have to wait until they got home, which meant, until then, his death would be hanging over her head.
When she took her place before the others, when she began to explain why Rudy mattered so much, she was surprised to discover that her voice shook. She had to stop a couple of times. She tried surreptitiously to wipe her eyes, and finally she poured everything out. He’d stood for all the things she believed in. He’d never backed off even though other careers had been so much more lucrative than the Foundation. And in the end, he’d sacrificed everything, a decent married life, the respect of his colleagues, and ultimately life itself, to the idea that humans had a greater destiny than hanging around the house.
Antonio said simply that he’d liked Rudy, that he’d been good company, and that he’d miss him.
Jon expressed his appreciation for Rudy’s support. “Without him,” he said, “we wouldn’t have gotten out here.”
Matt started by saying he’d known Rudy only a short time. He thanked him, surprisingly, for giving him something to live for. And ended by blaming himself for his death. “I took my eyes off the top of the staircase. The steps were so hard to navigate. The thing just came out of nowhere. And I panicked. He was depending on me, and I panicked.”
“I don’t know anybody,” Hutch told him, “who wouldn’t have reacted the same way. Give yourself a break.”
She’d lost people on prior missions. It had started a lifetime ago, on Quraqua, when she’d been perhaps not as quick as she should have been, and Richard Wald had died. There’d been other decisions that had gone wrong. She might have allowed them to haunt her, to drive her to her knees. But she’d done her best at the time. And that was all anyone could reasonably ask. No one had ever died because she’d screwed around.
“It happens,” she told Matt. “If you do these kinds of flights, going places no one’s ever been before, there’s always a risk. We all accept that. You do your best. If something happens, something goes wrong, you have to be able to live with it. And move on.”
EASY TO SAY. She’d remember all her life watching the oversized white serpent slither down into the hole Matt and the others had dug, and her sense of helplessness while she tried to get them on the link—Come on, Matt, answer up, please—the whole time running for the lander, climbing into an e-suit, telling Jon what was happening and why she couldn’t stop to go to the McAdams to pick him up.
Jon took her aside and asked whether they shouldn’t terminate the flight and return home. The tradition at the Academy in such cases had been flexible, which was to say there had been no tradition. In the event of a fatality, sometimes the mission went forward. Sometimes it was terminated. The decision had been left to the survivors. They knew best.
The Academy had suffered relatively few losses over the years. The wall that served as a memorial to those who had died on Academy missions had never come close to using the allotted space. It still stood in its time-honored place, near the Galileo Fountain on the edge of what had been the Academy grounds.
“We’ve made our point,” Jon persisted. “The Locarno works fine. Why bother going farther?”
She recalled Rudy’s comment when they had asked whether he planned on making the flight. This is going to be remembered as the Silvestri mission. But they’re going to remember the crew, too. And I like the idea of having my name associated with yours. “I think we should continue,” she told him. “Taking the body home accomplishes nothing. He wouldn’t want us to turn back.”
“Okay,” he said. “Whatever you say.”
MATT KNEW HUTCH was right, that he wasn’t really responsible for Rudy’s death. And the knowledge helped. But in the end he also knew that if he’d performed better, Rudy would still be alive. And there was no getting around that.
He refused the meds she suggested. Taking them would have been an admission of something. They all stayed on board the McAdams the night of the ceremony, huddled together, herd instinct. Antonio told him in front of Hutch and Jon that it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d reacted differently. “I jumped into him, too, and nothing you did would have stopped that. When that snake head showed up my reflexes took over, and all I could think of was to get out of there. So stop beating yourself up.”
During his years as a pilot, Matt had never faced a day like this. He’d never lost a passenger, had never even seen one in danger. He’d always thought of himself as a heroic type. Women had automatically assumed he was a couple of cuts above ordinary men. Antonio, he’d known from the start, was ordinary. If there was anybody who’d been run-of-the-mill, an average middle-aged guy, it was Antonio.
But at the critical moment, Antonio had grabbed the gun and blown the serpent away. He’d stood up while Matt flinched. That fact would be hard to put behind him.
MATT COULDN’T SLEEP. He kept replaying the sequence over and over. What he remembered most vividly was that there’d been no place to hide, that he feared the creature would swallow him whole. Gulp him down like a piece of sausage.
He got up to use the washroom. Hutch must have been awake as well because moments after he returned to his compartment there was a soft knock at the door.
“Matt, are you okay?” She was still in her uniform.
“My God,” he said, “don’t you ever go to bed?” It was after three.
“I’m reading.”
“Couldn’t put it down?”
“Nope. It’s Damon Runyon.”
“Who?”
“Twentieth century.” She smiled. “You’d like him.”
He got his robe and joined her in the common room. She made coffee, and they talked about Runyon’s good-hearted gangsters, and the black hole at Tenareif, and whether they should start tomorrow on the next leg of the flight. Jim broke in to report that the samples brought back from the tower and the buried building—he had analyzed the tabletop piece to which the book had been frozen—indicated that both structures were about three hundred years old.
That brought up another question: The signal received at Cherry Hill had been transmitted fifteen thousand years ago. The space station went adrift, got knocked out of orbit, whatever, also in ancient times. But they’d still had a functioning civilization within the last few hundred years. What had happened to them?
Maybe the same thing that had happened at Makai? They’d learned how to live too long? Got bored?
“No,” said Hutch. “This feels more like a catastrophe.”
“An omega?”
“That would explain the fused circuits on the station. A few good bolts of lightning.”
The conversation inevitably wandered back to Rudy, but it didn’t touch on Matt’s role in his death. They were still there at five, when Jon came out to see what the noise was.
“Rehearsing for Guys and Dolls,” Matt said.
THEY STAYED IN orbit two days, making maps and taking pictures of the world. Meanwhile they thawed the book and gave it to Jim. He analyzed it and reported that he was able to translate some of the material. “Matt was right. It was a hotel. The book is a listing of services, of menus, of the contents of the hotel library, which seem to have consisted of both books and VR. And of attractions available in the area. You were right also that the place was a center for skiing.”
“Great,” said Matt. “That’s what he died for? A hotel package?”
“There’s more. More difficult to translate, but seemingly unconnected with the hotel. I’ve been able to do some translation, but the overall meaning tends to be elusive.”
“Explain.”
“Let me give you an example.”
“Okay.”
“‘The sea is loud at night, and there are voices in the tide. At another time, in another place, the moon did not speak. We were amused.’”
He stopped and they looked at one another. “Is that it?” asked Jon.
“That is a single piece of text, separated from the others.”
Jim put the lines on-screen. Matt frowned at it. “‘The moon did not speak’?”