We said no and thanked her, and she was gone.
Glenn jaunted near and offered a hug. I accepted without hesitation. Her p-suit was cool on my bare flesh, but not unpleasantly so. “Thank you, Morgan, very much. I’d never have had the nerve to do that.”
“Glad to. It seemed like it was called for. Are you okay now?”
“Yes, I think I am. I need to sit kûkanzen some more, but I think I’ll be able to go back out there tomorrow—thanks to you and Robert. Good night.”
To my mild surprise, she hugged Robert too. “Thank you for lending me some of your courage,” she said, and left.
Robert and I looked at each other and smiled.
“Where were we?” I said.
“About to make some memories so good that we’ll relive them every day for the next two hundred years,” he said.
We certainly did our best. After a while reality turned all warm and runny, and when I was tracking again I noticed idly that Kirra and Ben were in the room now too. But there was no need to restart my brain: they were busy, just like we were. I don’t think Robert even noticed. Good concentration, that man.
Yumiko died the next day.
For the second day in a row, she failed to check her air supply—and this time Sulke did not remind us before opening the Solarium window. An hour later Yumiko failed to respond to a direction. It’s hard to see how one could run out of air without noticing something is wrong…but if Yumiko ever did realize she had a problem, she was too polite to bring it up. They say lifeguards in Japan have to be terribly alert, because drowners there can be too self-effacing to disturb everyone’s wa by calling for help. When she was missed, it was too late.
(Reb flashed to her side, diagnosed her problem, threw her empty tanks into deep space and replaced them with his own, headed for home on what air he had in his suit, squeezing her chest energetically enough to crack ribs as he went—to no avail. When they got her out of the suit she was irretrievably brain dead.)
Sulke would not cancel the rest of the class, and insisted on taking us all out again in the afternoon. She was so clearly controlling anger that I knew she must be feeling horrid guilt—and she did not deserve it, in my opinion: there comes a time when the teacher must stop wiping the students’ noses. She had told us yesterday, space does not forgive. But she could not forgive herself, either.
Reb conducted the funeral service that night. Little Yumiko had been a follower of Ryobu Shinto, or Two-aspect Shinto, an attempt to reconcile Shinto with Buddhism which had recently been revived in Japan after more than a thousand years of dormancy; apparently they used the Buddhist funeral rites. There were prayers offered in all the other holy places in Top Step as well; sadly, those pages were well thumbed in all the hymnals.
Robert and I attended none of these observances. We held one of our own, in my room, saying goodbye to Yumiko and consoling ourselves in the only real way there is, the oldest one of all. I’m pretty sure Kirra and Ben were doing the same thing down the hall…and doubtless others were too. Sudden death seems to call for the ultimate affirmation of life. Sharing it brought Robert and me closer together; all smallest reservations gone, I gave my heart to him, opened to him as though he were my Symbiote, and he flowed into me.
As I was trying to fall asleep, I kept thinking that I had barely known Yumiko. Sure, she had been shy—but if I had made the effort, gotten to know her, she could have lived forever as real as real in my brain once I became Symbiotic. I hoped her roommate Soon Li had made the effort.
Chapter Nine
This is merely a series of events. Their only correlation is that they all occurred within the same time-frame.
The next morning’s Eva was also eventful. Nobody died, but the near miss was spectacular.
We had progressed in proficiency to the point where Sulke would have half a dozen of us at a time unsnap our umbilicals and practice thruster use without constraint—six being the most she and Reb were confident of being able to supervise at one time. Learning precise thruster control was not easy, and several times Reb and Sulke had to rescue someone who’d blundered into something they couldn’t figure out how to undo. Sulke tended to hair-trigger reflexes; she was determined not to lose any more students. But Reb’s gentle good humor counterbalanced her and kept it being fun.
Raise your hands as if in surrender, palms forward. Your thrusters are now pointing in the same direction you’re facing. Put your arms down at your sides with your thumbs against your thighs, and the thrust is in the opposite direction. By torquing your forearms you can aim in almost any direction or combination of directions. Your ankle-thrusters, however, face in only one direction, “down,” and have only the one axis of motion. From those postulates all the equations of free-space jaunting are derived—and they’re complicated and often counterintuitive.
It took, believe me, a lot of courage to let go of that umbilical and hang alone and unsupported in space. I managed to do it, and to get through my short stint without disgracing myself or alarming Sulke, but my heart was pounding when I reconnected myself to my tether. Ben and Kirra were in the next group, and I watched with interest, knowing that they would do this well.
They did it beautifully, well enough to draw spontaneous applause. (Clapping your hands in a p-suit is a waste of energy. You applaud by making approving sounds. Softly, as dozens of people are sharing the same radio circuit.) What they did was more calisthenics than dance, but the consummate grace and skill with which they did it made it dance. Ben especially had pin-point control, using the tiniest bursts of gas to start himself moving and stop himself again when he was where he wanted to be. When they had run through the sequence of exercises, he and Kirra improvised a phrase similar to a square dance do-see-do, jetting toward each other and pivoting in slow motion around each other’s crooked elbow. As they separated again, Ben suddenly went into a violent high-speed spin, spraying yellow gas like a Catherine Wheel. It was lovely, and we started to applaud…and then suddenly it was ugly, asymmetrical and uncontrolled. The applause died away and we could clearly hear him say, “Oh, shit.”
“What’s wrong?” Kirra cried, beating Sulke to it by a hair.
“Both left thrusters jammed full open.” I could see now that he was beating his right fist into his left palm, trying to free up the jammed controls, but it wasn’t working. He gave it up and flailed wildly for a moment, moving through space like a leaf in a storm.
“Here I come!” Kirra cried.
“No!” Sulke roared.
“No—stay clear!” Ben agreed. “I’m rogue, it’s too dangerous. Besides, I think maybe I…” Suddenly he came out of his tumble and his attitude stabilized. His left wrist was cocked over his head, balancing the ankle thrust; he was vectoring slowly away from us, but at least he was no longer a pinwheel. “There.”
Kirra had reached him by then, having ignored both warnings. “What should I do, love?” she asked him, decelerating to match his vector, doing it perfectly.
“Dock with me upside down.” She did, locking her arms behind his knees, being careful not to kick him in the face. “Can you find the snap-release for that ankle-thruster?”