God damn him to hell, turning it around like that and dumping it back on me! Now if we break up it’ll be my choice, because I choose to cancel my seat home—and it’s his fierce respect for my free womanhood that keeps him from saying anything more than ‘he hopes I’ll be sensible.’ He wouldn’t say the fucking words, even after I did!
So close to having it all! Another lousy two or three weeks and I would have had dance and Symbiosis and Robert. How could I have been so stupid, thinking they’d let me have it all?
A part of my mind tried to argue. You can still have Symbiosis. The whole Starmind, all these people, will enfold you and—
—and love me, right? When nobody else ever has.
A thought forced its way into my head. Robert had gone down the hall to use his own terminal. Kirra and Ben were presumably there. They would see what he was typing. Or he’d shield the monitor, which would make them curious. At any moment Kirra might come jaunting in here, grimly determined to have me cry on her shoulder. I don’t cry on anybody’s shoulder. When I cry, I cry alone. I forced my sobs to subside. I could not achieve control of my breath, but I made the tears dry up. I jaunted to the vanity, got tissues, and honked and wiped and snuffled and wiped. I checked my face in the mirror, made myself wash it. “Teena, is my studio free?”
“Repeat, please, Morgan,” Teena said in her mechanical voice.
I took a shuddering deep breath, got my voice under control, and repeated the question. Yes, she said, it was available. I told her I wanted it for the rest of the day, and she said that was acceptable. I told her I wanted it for the rest of month, and she said I would have to clear that with Dorothy Gerstenfeld or Phillipe Mgabi. I started to tell her I wanted it for the rest of my life…and thanked her and left for the studio. I actually got within fifty meters of it before collapsing into tears again. What triggered it was the sudden realization that I had not given a single thought to Glenn since I’d gotten back to my room. And now I was going to miss her funeral. The tears flew from my eyes like bullets. No one was around to see, and I sealed the hatch behind me before anyone came along.
If you’re ever going to have a day like that, try to have it later in the day. It took me hours to cry myself to sleep.
In similar situations back on Earth I used to lie on the studio floor and cry, let the floor drink my tears as it so often drank my blood. Here there was no floor. I missed it bitterly.
Chapter Eleven
I got home a few hours before breakfast. Kirra was alone in the room, and woke as I came in. “Are you right, love?”
I knew that was Aussie for, are you all right?, but I couldn’t help hearing the words as they sounded too. “Ask me again next year,” I said to both questions. “You heard, huh?”
“We heard.” She slipped out of her sleepsack. “Robert’s found himself another room until the ship leaves.”
“Where’s Ben?”
“I told him I’d wait here for you alone ’til brekkie, then we were gonna hunt you down together.”
By then she had reached me, and was hugging me. It helped a little, as much as anything could help. She did not say a single one of the clichés I’d been dreading, only held me. After a time she began singing softly, in Yirlandji, and that helped me a little too.
Awhile later she said, “Tucker?” and I said, “No. You go,” and she nodded. “Bring you back somethin’?” she asked, and I said, “No.” She left, and I slid into my sleepsack and went fetal.
She let me have the rest of the day, and then at around suppertime she showed up with what might just have been the only thing in human space that could have made me feel like eating. “You’re not serious,” I said when she took it out of its thermos bag and tossed it to me. “How could you possibly—”
“Sulke knows a bloke at the Shimizu.”
“But it must have cost—”
“The bloke liked me Song o’ Polar Orbit a lot; it’s his shout.”
Even in my misery it reached me. A full litre of fine Chilean chocolate chip ice cream. Back in Vancouver it would have been an expensive luxury; here it was a pearl without price. She had heard me speak longingly of it several times; she’d even remembered my favorite flavour. I had no idea what her favorite flavour was. “Pull up a spoon,” I said, and we dug in together.
As we ate she filled me in on the news.
It was going just as Robert had predicted. Third-Monthers were Graduating en masse. Some of the rest of us, mostly Novices, had decided they were ready for early Graduation—from one to five weeks early!—and some, mostly Postulants, had suddenly remembered pressing business dirtside. Already there were no more seats available on the next regularly scheduled transport (two days hence), and the special charter that had been announced was filling up fast. Robert and I were not the only couple who had split up.
There were some students who took neither course. Some lacked the imagination to realize how comprehensive a disaster it would have been if that missile had destroyed the docks—and some were just the kind of people who insist on building their home on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius or in San Francisco. (Come to think of it, Robert was going home to San Francisco. What kind of logic was that?)
And of course there were the spacers on staff. Going dirtside was not an option for them. Those who could were trying to change jobs, or rather, eliminate Top Step from their job rotations. Those who could not were trying to get work deep inboard, on the theory that they’d be safer from attack. It was a shaky theory.
I was unsurprised to learn Kirra and Ben’s choice.
“We’re doin’ it, love. Ben and me, this Sunday. I reckon you guessed we would.”
“Good for you,” I said. My eyes were stinging. “Pushing ahead the wedding. That makes me really happy.”
“You want to join us?”
“Thanks for asking. But no. I’m not ready. Reb would never let me do it in this state. You two go on—I’ll catch you up as soon as I can.”
Privately I wondered if I meant that. I still was not utterly certain that I wanted to go through with Symbiosis. The idea of lowering all my defenses, forever, was seeming less and less attractive. Wouldn’t it be just perfect if I finally decided to chicken out…after cutting my ties with Robert? If I played my cards right, I could come out of this with nothing at all.
The next couple of days were sheerest hell. I kept going over and over it in my mind. A thousand times I asked myself, why not just go back to Earth and Robert? So he didn’t love me the way I loved him; he cared, and that could well become love in time. A thousand times I answered, because he had made it an ultimatum, and because he would not admit he had done so, and because I just couldn’t risk losing dance forever, even for him.
And because he hadn’t asked me to—just assumed I’d “be sensible.”
A thousand times I concluded I had made the right decision. But I didn’t call Teena and tell her to cancel the reservation Robert had made in my name.
He called me once, about twenty-four hours after the quarrel. I had instructed Teena not to put through any calls from him, so he recorded a long message. When she told me, I had her wipe it, unplayed. A mistake: I spent hours wondering what he had said.
Twice I forced myself to go to the cafeteria, using Teena to make sure he was not there at the time. The food tasted like hell. Once I let Ben and Kirra (almost literally) drag me to Le Puis. Even Fat Humphrey didn’t cheer me up, nor the Hurricanes he prescribed for me. With Kirra right there listening, Ben made the politest pass I’d ever received; I almost smiled as I thanked him and turned him down.