Oyamo settled opposite and began to set up the game. The magnetized figures had been designed with space-age motifs. The pawns wore EMU space suits. The knights were sleek aerospace planes. The rooks were fanciful third-generation space stations.
Ramsanjawi noticed Lorraine Renoir join Tighe at his table. He could not hear what they were saying, but it was obvious they were annoyed with each other.
Oyamo attacked with his knights and bishops. Ramsanjawi was so intent on the brewing argument that he failed to pay attention to the game. Oyamo’s opening moves had him on the run.
A surge of adrenaline swept away Ramsanjawi’s interest in the wardroom encounter. He moved swiftly to the attack, capturing one of Oyamo’s bishops, both of his knights, and putting the space queen in jeopardy. Many an Englishman’s competitive fire had been stoked on the playing fields of Eton. Ramsanjawi’s had been fanned by the youthful Derek Brock-Smythe.
They had been an odd pair; Derek porcelain white and exquisitely tiny, Chakra dark and lithe despite a belly distended from years of poor diet. Derek’s tongue was sharp and he was in constant nervous motion. Chakra was shy, his movements languorous, almost lazy. Derek resented the filthy interloper and only grudgingly obeyed his parents’ commands to be civil to his Indian adopted brother. Cagily, he resorted to competition in order to make Chakra feel unwelcome. But Derek’s problem was that he was not very good at sports. He challenged Chakra at tennis, squash, and croquet, and Chakra always won. He even challenged Chakra to a footrace, but his mincing gait was no match for Chakra’s nimble strides.
As one unusually warm summer drew to a close, Derek challenged Chakra to golf, a game neither supposedly ever had played, at a course outside at Bath. During the round, it became apparent to Chakra that he had been duped. Derek had secretly played the game all summer and had received instruction from a battery of professionals.
Chakra did not know golf, but he knew physics. He hung in the match long enough for the increasingly nervous Derek to self-destruct, as he always did in their competitions. Chakra won the last hole, and with it the match. He could still see Derek, stomping furiously next to the flagstick in the orange light of dusk and shouting, “You may have beaten me. But you’ll never be an aristocrat. You’ll never be a true Englishman. Never! Never! Never!”
Ramsanjawi deftly removed Oyamo’s space queen from the board and bore down on the king. The Japanese amused him, trying so hard to look inscrutable, impassive. Yet every time Ramsanjawi leaned forward across the board, Oyamo leaned back. As if an invisible force kept them apart by a rigid full meter. The Japanese are trained to remain that distance away, Ramsanjawi reflected. It is a cultural trait, quite unconscious. Like their fanatical insistence on cleanliness and bathing.
Oyamo allowed Ramsanjawi to pursue his king for eleven moves before finally placing himself in checkmate. It pleased this would-be Englishman to win at chess. It loosened his braggart’s tongue.
As they set up for another game Oyamo deftly moved the topic of their conversation to their work. He knew that progress among the Europeans was painfully slow, and for some reason Ramsanjawi did not seem worried by it. The Americans would slow down, too, now that Nutt had left the station. He had been the only one among them with any flash of inspiration, any drive at all.
Oyamo grunted and nodded and let Ramsanjawi talk away in his strange mixture of Oxford and Delhi. The bloated Indian thinks we are playing chess. Oyamo knew better.
23 AUGUST 1998
TRIKON STATION
LAST TESTAMENT OF THORA SKILLEN
It seems strange to be writing to a dead person, Melissa, but you were always the only one I could confide in. Soon I will be joining you, but before I do I need to tell you how much I depended on you, how much I miss you, how much I love you.
You always thought I was the strong one, I know. But without you I would be nothing. I protected you against Father, true; that was easy to do. I hadn’t the real strength I needed to protect myself.
When I watched you dying, week after week, month after month, I realized that my whole life had been a lie. At first I felt guilty that it was you who was dying, the good one, while I was being allowed to live. But less than two weeks after we buried you, they told me I had cystic fibrosis, too. A bad gene, they said. What irony! A molecular geneticist with a bad gene.
It was at that moment that I realized how much of a lie I had been living. My so-called brilliant career has been based on using their antidiscrimination rules against them. They couldn’t refuse to hire me, they couldn’t refuse to promote me. That would be discrimination against women, against lesbians, against the diseased. That’s how I got here to Trikon Station over the heads of better scientists.
Of course, they saw a chance to use me as a guinea pig in this weightless environment. They got something out of me, after all. So be it.
I belong to an organization of sisters now. Not sisters in the same sense we are, so close that not even death can entirely separate us. But my new sisters care for me, and I for them. They have helped me to advance through the labyrinth of male-dominated corporate organizations, helped me to get to Trikon Station.
The work here is the most advanced genetic engineering yet attempted. Not satisfied with having already ruined the Earth, they want to defile outer space and make more genetically altered microbes that will cause more problems for the world. My task is to keep that from happening, to make this research so painfully slow and expensive that they will eventually abandon it.
But another idea keeps running through my mind. How delicious it would be if everyone here died of some toxic microbe that they themselves have concocted! That will show the world how wrong it is to meddle with life. That will put an end to their constant interference with nature.
Do I have the skill to pull it off? I have the nerve—I think. When you know you’re going to die anyway, what difference does it make?
Whatever happens, I will be with you soon. Our loneliness will end forever.
In the darkness of his compartment, Dan Tighe unhitched himself from his sleep restraint, floating out like a dolphin leaving the womb. He flexed his shoulders and straightened his knees, savoring the welcome sensation of morning in his muscles and bones. Rather than switch on the light, he groped along the array of storage compartments for his toiletry kit and a fresh towel. Then he carefully pulled back the accordion door, still wearing the wrinkled, faded coveralls he had slept in.
Dan enjoyed early morning. Even though Trikon Station went through sixteen sunrises in every twenty-four-hour period, hardly anyone aboard the station saw the outside except through video screens. The planners had designed the interior system to cue normal circadian rhythms. The lights in the connecting tunnels and other common areas dimmed every evening and brightened every morning in an artificial approximation of dusk and dawn. The system effectively prevented the inhabitants from “going around the clock,” the tendency to awaken and retire one hour later each day unless aroused by the morning sun.
At 0530 hours, the lights were still dim. Dan had the station to himself, a feeling of solitude that he cherished. The only sounds were the hum of the ventilation system and the occasional creaks of the module shells as they expanded or contracted in sunlight or darkness. They weren’t cricket chirps or bird songs, but they were comforting just the same.