Everybody talked at once. Relief was the first emotion, relief to be alive. The release of nervous energy was almost like elation. But those empty cradles told a harrowing story. People would wander off alone and glance at the sky, as if expecting one of the lost ships to come limping home even now.
Pirius’s most difficult meeting was with Torec. She hugged him, but her small face, inside her visor, was closed with grief. “I’ve got you back,” she said, “but I’ve lost you as well. How am I supposed to cope with that?”
“I don’t know,” he murmured.
Once inside the base, the crew were taken through standard post-operation processing.
First the medics checked them over. All but one, a navigator with a broken arm, were released. Then they were taken to a refectory, where food and drink were heaped up. They suddenly discovered how hungry they were. But there was enough food for thirty, and it was uncomfortable to be surrounded by empty chairs.
After that, though Pirius felt so exhausted he thought he would sleep for a week, they were taken away for preliminary debriefs, individually, in crews, and then as a whole. That went on for six wearying hours, until at last a consensus Virtual record of the operation was put together, combining all their viewpoints and the logs of the surviving ships. The crews accepted this as necessary. Details about the mission could be argued over for years, but these first moments, when memories were fresh and unclouded by sentiment or denial, were essential for an accurate record. It was grueling work, though.
Marshal Kimmer sat silently throughout these sessions. The only emotion he showed came when Pirius described how he had taken his ship back for a second run on Chandra, to guide Blue and to deflect the flak.
When the debrief was over, Kimmer approached Pirius. “You were right,” he said gruffly. “I should have waited for the debrief. But I’ll say it again. Well done, Pilot.” He seemed to want to say more, but his small, mean-looking mouth appeared incapable of expression. He bowed and walked away, his entourage of aides at his heels.
By now Pirius was so tired he felt numb, detached, as if he were still wearing a skinsuit. But he knew he had one more duty.
Commissary Nilis was in his room, deep in Officer Country. Pila sat with him. They were sorting through data desks, and Virtual images of Chandra and its surrounds floated in the air. Nilis actually shied away from Pirius when he came in, a kind of shame showing in his broad, rumpled face.
Pila, though, gazed at Pirius. “Well done,” she said softly.
He wondered what she was feeling. This strange, cold woman from Earth had been on her own journey, he supposed. He said, “I couldn’t have done it without you, Pila. I won’t forget that.” He turned to Nilis and said formally, “Commissary — I was glad to have taken part in the final experiment that proved your theories.”
That took Nilis by surprise. “Oh, my boy, my boy. Thank you! And you validated my faith in you, in spades. You have come a long way from that mixed-up child on Port Sol and Venus, my boy, a long, long way. You are a man — you poor wretch!
“And of course it has been a great technical achievement.” He smiled, his rheumy eyes wet. “Who would have thought, when we were limping around in Sol system, that we could have brought it off? Well, I always had faith in you, Pirius; I knew you could do it, if anybody could.”
“And we made history today.”
“Oh, yes, there’s that too. How remarkable to think that of all the galaxies we see in the sky, only ours is clear of the Xeelee — and all thanks to human endeavor! And it is a historic moment in other ways. It’s a fallacy, you know, that communication is always possible between alien cultures. The dismal records of the Assimilation prove that. Sometimes perceptions of our common universe simply diverge too much. In an awful lot of first contacts, ’communication’ is primaclass="underline" only to be ignored, eaten, or attacked. And there is no record of the Xeelee attempting any form of communication with any lesser species, save extreme violence. But in this incident they did respond. We threatened Chandra, they withdrew, we did not attack; information, of a sort, passed between us, and a kind of agreement was reached.” He sighed. “If only it were possible to build on this breakthrough! Perhaps the perpetual war could be ended. But I fear that may be Utopian.”
Pirius knew how important this sort of philosophical stuff was to the Commissary. “A triumph in many ways, then.”
“Yes.” But Nilis’s face crumpled. “But too many people were lost — too many young lives rubbed out because of me and my dreams. Those moments when the first two runs failed, and I thought that despite the sacrifices I had demanded, I had failed, were almost more than I could bear.”
Pirius tried to find words about the proportionality of the losses compared to what had been gained. But Nilis, he saw, was inconsolable for now. After a time he left him to his work.
In their barracks, Torec was already asleep. She hadn’t even taken off the coverall given her by the medics after they peeled her out of her skinsuit. Pirius crawled in with her. She stirred, mumbled, and turned into his arms, a bundle of soft warm humanity.
He had thought he would be too agitated to sleep. Besides, he felt guilty about lying down to sleep when others had died, or were still out there. If he slept, this long day would finally end, and he would somehow lose it, lose them.
But sleep rose up like a black tide, regardless.
The next day, his first priority was his crews.
He toured the base. They were in their barracks, or the refectories, or the sick bays, or the gyms and training rooms where they had gone to work out the tension from their systems. A couple of them had gone back to the ships to help the ground crews with their own investigations and debriefing.
Some just accepted what had happened. It was a gamble worth taking, they said; you win some, you lose some. Others were bitter at the stupidity of the commanders, including Pirius himself, who had sent them into the Cavity with such poor intelligence. He absorbed their anger. And some just talked. They went over and over what they had done, telling and retelling their own small war stories as part of the whole. That was all right. It was part of the healing, and Pirius’s job now was to listen. And it wasn’t going to stop here, he knew. The shock of what they had gone through, and the guilt at having survived where others hadn’t, would never leave them.
Pirius had lost a temporal twin, a part of himself, and he wondered which way his own damage would work out — and how Torec, who had lost her lover and welcomed him home at the same time, would sort out her own complicated, guilt-ridden grief.
More than twenty-four hours after Pirius’s return, This Burden Must Pass brought his own battered ship home.
Pirius hurried to meet him, and walked with his crew to the sick bay. With his visor cracked open, Burden’s face was drawn, dried sweat was crusted under his shadowed eyes, and his hair was plastered to his head. Burden said that they had encountered no Xeelee harassment on the way back. “It looks as if it really is true,” he said. “They have abandoned the Galaxy to mankind. And because of us.”
“Quite a story to add to that end-of-time confluence of yours,” Pirius said.
“Yes, quite a story.” Burden said more slowly, “Pirius. About what happened out there—”
“Forget it,” Pirius snapped.
“I can’t do that,” Burden said. “If I’d gone into Chandra as you ordered, as was my duty, maybe Blue would have survived.”
“We’ll never know. We’ve all come home with regrets, Burden. Now we move on.”
Burden nodded, his eyes downcast. “We move on.”