It was by far the longest speech I had gotten out of the epigrammatic Chen since the day we met. I looked at him with new respect, and some astonishment. And a growing pleasure: here was a friend I had almost missed making. My God, suppose old Chenis Homonovis?
“Dr. Chen,” I said, when I could get my breath, “let’s go see Commander Cox.”
Chen listened with total absorption to eighteen hours’ worth of instruction, most of which he already knew, and asked infrequent but highly insightful questions. I’m willing to bet that before the instruction he could have disassembled any subsystem in his suit in the dark. By the end I’d have bet he could build ’em in the dark, starting with free-floating components. I have been exposed to a rather high number of extraordinary minds, and he impressed me.
But Istill wasn’t sure I trusted him.
We held the party to three, on the less-to-go-wrong theory—in space, trouble seldom comes in ones. I was the obvious Scoutmaster; I had logged more EVA hours than anyone aboard except Harry. And Linda had been Chen’s Alien 101 instructress for the past year; she came along to maintain classroom continuity. And to dance for him, while I played Mother Hen. And, I think, because she was his friend.
The first hour passed without incident, all three of us in the Die, me at the con. We put a few klicks between us and Siegfried, trailing a suspenders-and-belt safety line, and came to rest, as always, in the exact center of infinity. Chen was reverentially silent rather than awed, impressed rather than intimidated, absorbed rather than isolated. He was, I believe, capable of encompassing that much wonder—it was almost as though he had always known the universe was that big. Still he was speechless for a long time.
So were Linda and I, for that matter. Even at this distance Saturn looked unbelievably beautiful, beyond the power of words to contain. That planet must unquestionably be the damndest tourist attraction in the Solar System, and I had never seen anything so immensely moving in my life.
But we had seen it before in recent days—the whole ship’s complement had been glued to the video tanks. We recovered, and Linda told Chen some last thoughts about the way we danced, and then she sealed her hood and went out the airlock to show him some solo work. By prearrangement we were all to remain silent for this period, and Bill too maintained radio silence on our channel. Chen watched with great fascination for three quarters of Linda’s first hour. Then he sighed, glanced at me oddly, and kicked himself across the Die to the control panel.
I started to cry out—but what he reached for was only the Die’s radio. He switched it off. Then he removed his helmet in one practiced-seeming move, disconnecting his suit’s radio. I had my own hood off to save air, and grabbed for it when I saw him kill the radio, but he held a finger to his lips and said, “I would speak with you under the rose.” His voice was thin and faint in the low pressure.
I considered the matter. Assuming the wildest paranoid fantasy, Linda was mobile and could see anything that happened in the transparent cube. “Sure,” I called.
“I sense your unease, and understand and respect it. I am going to put my hand in my right pouch and remove an object. It is harmless.” He did so, producing one of those microcorders that looks like a fancy button. “I wish there to be truth between us,” he added. Was it low pressure stridency alone that gave his voice that edge?
I groped for an appropriate response. Beyond him, Linda was whirling gracefully through space, sublimely pregnant, oblivious. “Sure,” I said again.
He thumbnailed the playback niche. Linda’s recorded voice said something that I couldn’t hear, and I shook my head. He rewound to the same cue and underhanded it gently toward me.
“That’s what I mean,” Linda’s voice repeated. “Their interests and ours may not coincide.”
The tape record I spoke of a while ago.
My brain instantly went on computer time, became a hyper-efficient thinking machine, ran a thousand consecutive analysis programs in a matter of microseconds, and self-destructed. Hand in the cookie jar. Halfway down the Mountain and the brakes are gone. I’d have sworn I closed that airlock. The microcorder hit me in the cheek; instinctively I caught it on the rebound and shut it off as Tom was asking Linda, “Aren’t we human?”
And that echoed in the Die for a while.
“Only an imbecile would find it difficult to bug an unguarded pressure suit,” Chen said tonelessly.
“Yeah,” I croaked, and cleared my throat. “Yeah, that was stupid. Who else—?” I broke off and slapped my forehead. “No. I don’t want to ask any stupid questions. Well, what do you think, Chen Ten Li? Are we Homo novis? Or just gifted acrobats? I’m God damned if I know.”
He jaunted cleanly back to me, like an arrow in slow-motion flight. Cats jaunt like that. “Homo caelestis, perhaps,” he said calmly, and his landing was clean. “Or possibly Homo ala anima.”
“Allah who? Oh—‘winged soul.’ Huh. Okay. I’ll buy that. Let me try a whammy on you, Doc. I’ll bet a cookie that you’re a ‘winged soul’ yourself. Potentially, at least.”
His reaction astonished me. I had expected a sudden poker face. Instead naked grief splashed his face, stark loss and hopeless yearning, etched by Saturnlight. I never saw such wide-open emotion on his face before or since; it may be that no one but his aged mother and his dead wife ever had. It shocked me to my socks, and it would have shocked him too if he had been remotely aware of it.
“No, Mist’ Armstead,” he said bleakly, staring at Saturn over my shoulder. His accent slipped for the first and last time, and absurdly reminded me of Fat Humphrey. “No, I am not one of you. Nor can time or my will make it so. I know this. I am reconciled to this.” As he got this far, his face began relaxing into its customary impassivity, all unconsciously. I marveled at the discipline of his subconscious mind, and interrupted him.
“I don’t know that you’re right. It seems to me that any man who can play three-D chess is a prime candidate for Homo Whateverthehell.”
“Because you are ignorant of three-D chess,” he said, “and of your own nature. Men play three-D chess on Earth. It was designed under one gravity, for a vertical player, and its classic patterns are linear. I have tried to play in free fall, with a set that is not fixed in that relationship to me, and I cannot. I can consistently beat the Martin-Daniels Program at flat chess” (world class) “but in free-fall three-D Mr. Brindle could easily defeat me, if I were unvain enough to play him. I can coordinate myself well enough aboard Siegfried or in this most linear of vehicles. But I can never learn to live for any length of time without what you call a ‘local vertical.’ ”
“It comes on slow,” I began.
“Five months ago,” Li interrupted, “the night light failed in my room. I woke instantly. It took me twenty minutes to locate the light switches. During that entire time I wept with fear and misery, and lost control of my sphincters. The memory offended me, so I spent several weeks devising tests and exercises. I must have a local vertical to live. I am a normal human.”
I was silent a long time. Linda had noticed our conversation; I signaled her to keep on dancing and she nodded. After I had thought things through I said, “Do you believe that our interests will fail to coincide with yours?”
He smiled, all diplomat again, and chuckled. “Are you familiar with Murphy’s Law, Mr. Armstead?”