“Better?” Lani asked quietly.
“Uh. Marginal.” He lay back on the sheets, dimly aware that he was naked.
She hung in the air over the bed, folded into lotus position, slowly descending. “You should get more sleep.”
“Uh, I…What time is it?”
She smiled slightly, as if she guessed his intentions. “It’s nearly ten.”
“Oh…I’m on watch soon.”
“You have to return to the living first.”
“I’ll… be okay.” Actually, he felt even worse. He couldn’t think straight. He had never been in a situation where he honestly didn’t know whether they had made love or not. Damned unlikely. I’ve never been much good with a skinful in me.
“You’re wondering,” Lani said, the faint smile playing on her lips.
“Ah… yeah.” She was always one move ahead of him.
“Let’s say your motives were pure.”
“Huh?”
“We talked for a long time and you said you wanted to see my wallworld.”
“Your…”
She uncurled and tapped a command plate on the bedpad. The room immediately leaped into being around them.
“Ow!”
“Oh, sorry. I’ll tune down the light.”
It was the crystal cavern. She had gone back there, carefully shot the many angles, captured the myriad facets. Brilliance refracted and glinted everywhere. Miraculously, she had managed to assemble views without any reflection of herself or her equipment, so the shining cavern was a vision no one could ever see in person. It was better than reality. Then she had arranged her room so that furniture and appliances occupied dark areas of the cavern, enhancing the effect.
“It’s great. Everybody else uses Earth scenes.”
She shrugged. “I can get that National Geographic tourist stuff anytime.”
Even through his logy blur he was impressed. And slowly he remembered their conversation, how she had seemed witty, warm, bristling with ideas. He had never noticed that before, never given her a chance, really…
“So I came to see it…”
She nodded, eyebrows arched in amusement. “And passed out.”
“Oh.”
“I thought you might not appreciate having people see you being hauled unconscious through the tunnels, back to your bunk.”
“I guess not.”
She blinked, bit at her lip, and then said carefully, “I… liked the way we talked last night, Carl. We’ve never really had a chance to say very much to each other. Not since the first weeks.”
“Yeah,” he said uncomfortably. “Been busy.”
She said firmly, “I know you won’t let go of Virginia right away.”
“Let go? I haven’t got her.”
“Let go of the hope, then.”
He nodded sourly. “Right.”
“Not immediately, I know that.”
He looked at Lani as if seeing her for the first time. She was different than he had thought. Maybe…
But Virginia…
“There’s no rush,” she said, seeming to know exactly what he thought. All my emotions must be written across my face, he realized uneasily.
“I… Maybe you’re right. I’m so damned confused.”
She leaned forward and kissed him daintily on the lips. “Don’t be. Just do the work and leave little things like love and life for later.”
He had to smile. “You’re making this a lot easier for me than I deserve.”
“I want to.”
“I…”
She put a silencing finger to his lips. “Shush. You don’t have to be civil, not with a hangover like that.”
He showered—she had installed her own equipment, even arranged a projection of the crystal cavern inside the stall—and dressed. She kissed him goodbye, and before he had fully registered their conversation he was making his way to the suit-up room, shaky but ready for duty.
He was already at work before the hangover cleared and he felt the sudden weight of depression descend again. Ever since leaving Earth, he had worked with single-minded determination, never questioning. But now he couldn’t keep his mind oft bigger issues, problems he could see coming in the days ahead. There was nobody tie could trust to take care of that, not any longer.
Carl felt a yawning emptiness, a foreboding.
Captain Cruz is gone. It just doesn’t seem possible. What in the frozen hell are we going to do?
SAUL
It should not have been possible.
Saul stared at the patch of green and brown in the petri dish. It didn’t take a lab regimen to know he was looking at something that just shouldn’t exist.
Standing in a relaxed, low-G crouch, Spacer Tech Jim Vidor peered over Saul’s shoulder. Strictly speaking, the man wasn’t even supposed to be here. The decon mask over his mouth and nose were sops to the official quarantine Saul was under.
Saul took a fresh handkerchief from the sterilizer and wiped his nose. After two days, when it seemed his body was in no great hurry to flop over and die from this tsuris of a cold, the isolation order had lost some of its original urgency. To spacers, disease was an abstract threat, anyway. Far more real to them was the trouble they were having with gunk getting into everything from air circulators to mechs, threatening the machinery that kept them all alive.
Nevertheless, Saul motioned for Vidor to stand back—for the same reason he had kept Virginia away, in spite of her mutinous entreaties.
Nick Malenkov might be right, after all. Anything could happen, when Halley was able to come up with things like this on the dish before him.
“The stuff was growing in the main dehumidifier, way up where Shaft One intersects A Level, Dr. Lintz. I showed it to Dr. Malenkov when I got back down here to Complex, but he’s busy full time in sick bay now that Peltier’s keeled over. He said you were the grand keeper of native animals on this iceberg, anyway, so I brought it to you.”
No doubt Nick assumed you’d use a mech messenger, Saul thought. Every few hours a mechanical knocked on his door, carrying a thermos of soup and a tiny note from Virginia. Maybe those little packets were the real reason his dammed bug hadn’t gotten any worse.
Working with his gloved hands in an isolation box, he used sterilized forceps to tease apart a clump of red and green threads, lifting a few onto a microscope slide. The unit whirred as probes crept forward into position. This thing that couldn’t exist obviously did exist. It had to be examined.
Naturally, Malenkov would not be interested in looking at anything as macroscopic as this. As Shift-1 physician, Nick’s chief concern was the strange and terrifying illness that had appeared out of nowhere, killed their leader, and now had another victim prostrate in sick bay.
The “thawing” of Bethany Oakes and half-a-dozen more replacements had been delayed by discovery of brown slime in the warming bins, which had to be cleaned laboriously by hand. The resumed unslotting was now keeping the Russian medic too occupied to bother with anything so large—and therefore “harmless” —as threads blowing in a faraway tunnel.
Saul, exiled to his own lab, had little to do except analyze the tissue samples taken from poor Miguel Cruz and the new patient… and deal with queries from a worried Earth Control. Mostly, he had a broad-spectrum incubation program under way, from which he couldn’t expect results for at least another thirty-six hours.