Adagio. Part 1

ADAGIO.

By Barry B. Longyear.

Tobias sat on the red-stone grave marker on the side of Graveyard Hill and watched as Forrest tortured the rocks with the portable generator he had taken from the cargo bay. Torture is what Lady Name called Forrest's game. Lady Name was convinced that Forrest was insane.

Tobias raised a grimy hand and rubbed his eyes. h.e.l.l, Lady Name was wig-picker bait herself. That's why she was called Lady Name. It was a temporary label for the woman until she could figure out just who the h.e.l.l she was. Or at least until she would say who she was. Cage and Forrest thought she had amnesia. Tobias didn't buy that, but he didn't care.

He lowered his hand and let his gaze wander past the main shelter dome until it came to rest upon the remains of the ship. Three kilometers behind the cargo vessel was the jagged ledge that had ventilated the command module as the ship ground to a stop. Through the rents in the command module, he could see Lady Name. She was silently watching Forrest. Motionless.

It was entirely possible that Lady Name would kill Forrest. A matter of indifference to Tobias. Somewhere below her in the twisted metal, Cage would be nervously working on the computer. Death still seemed to matter to Cage. His nerves were the direct result of Lady Name frequently sitting just out of his field of vision, staring at him, sharpening her knife upon one of the dead red stones.

The dried and cracked crust that had formed over the surface of the red dust when it last rained was almost all gone. The little bit of wind, the motion of the rocks, the feet of the humans had eroded the crust. And it had been such a long time since it had rained. When they had constructed the main shelter dome from the cargo-bay supplies, it had been gleaming white. Now it was covered with dull-red dust.

It seemed like years had pa.s.sed since they had put up the dome and installed the nutrition system. Twenty meters in diameter, it was large enough to shelter all five of them. Lady Name was the first one to move out and erect an individual shelter. There had been fifty of the plastic-plank shelter kits in the cargo bay. Now they each had one, only meeting in the dome to eat. The fact was that they could no longer stand each other.

The whisper of feet dragging in the dust interrupted Tobias's thoughts. Tillson. The footsteps stopped. .

"Is it possible, Tobias, that G.o.d has done this to us to provide us with a challenge against which to test our virtue?"

Tobias turned to his left and glared up at the chaplain. Tillson was naked again. "Stick it up your a.s.s, -Howard."

Chaplain Howard Tillson nodded gravely. "You are right, of course. You are very wise, Tobias. Very wise."

The chaplain turned and stumbled his way down the back of Graveyard Hill, his droopy buns jiggling with each step.

Tobias again pondered the fact that Tillson had a woman's a.s.s. Another fact to ponder was that rescue had best happen before Tillson's a.s.s got to look much better. He hollered down the hill at the jiggling a.s.s, "Tillson, put some clothes on!"

The chaplain stopped, turned, looked up at Tobias, and nodded. "You are right, of course. You are always right, Tobias."

Placing his hands upon his knees, Tobias pushed himself to his feet and dusted off the seat of his flight suit. He turned and looked down at the grave marker he had been sitting on. Osborn's marker. It was a smooth, red stone just like Mikizu's.

They had to use only the red stones for grave markers. They didn't walk off.

The gray stone Tobias had originally used to mark Osborn's grave was now several meters downslope, running like h.e.l.l, Forrest claimed. It had taken the gray stone five of the planet's month-long days to race the short distance. Gray stones, white stones, green stones, black stones. They littered the red landscape. They were alive. The red ones didn't move.

They were dead.

Osborn was dead. And Mikizu. He let his gaze wander two meters to the left to another red stone. When Mikizu had piloted the ship, shearing it off that ledge, he had lost his head. Tobias knew because he had carried that head to the grave while Forrest and Cage carried the pilot's remainder.

Too quick, Tobias thought. Too quick and clean a death for you, Mikizu. Tobias unsealed his suit and p.i.s.sed on the pilot's grave. When he was finished he stumbled down the hill, entered his individual shelter, and flopped down on his cot. He closed his eyes thinking of dead red grave markers.

Osborn was dead. Mikizu was dead. Mikizu was no loss. If it hadn't been for him they wouldn't be stranded. But Osborn. Tobias wished Osborn were still alive. He'd know what to do. But Osborn had to be a hero ....

He had sat in the sputtering flashes of the emergency lights, watching Osborn's eyeb.a.l.l.s leak. The chief engineer was in the wreckage of the engineering deck, inhaling vacuum, the seat of his trousers puddling with p.i.s.s and blood, the fluid from his eyeb.a.l.l.s dribbling down his cheeks.

There had been plenty of time for Osborn to get on his suit. The hull damage in aft engineering had dumped only the pressure from that compartment. The rest of the ship lost pressure only because of the warped bulkhead seals. It took minutes for the ship to lose cabin pressure. But Osborn wanted to flick switches, punch b.u.t.tons, and twirl k.n.o.bs. The rest of them probably owed him their lives. The a.s.shole.

"Tobias?" The headset in his suit spoke. It was the pilot, Mikizu. "Engineering? Osborn? Tobias?"

Tobias answered. "What?"

"Osborn?"

"Osborn's dead."

A brief pause. "Tobias, I need to know the power situation."

Through his suit's faceplate, he glanced at the remains of the engineering board. "I can't help but believe, Mikizu, that you know just about as much as I do about that."

"The bridge panel is dead."

"No s.h.i.t." He leaned back against the bulkhead, glanced at Osborn, and closed his eyes. "We're all dead back here, too."

"I need power if we're going to go down."

"Is there any point?"

"Forrest thinks so."

Forrest. Second pilot. A little b.a.s.t.a.r.d but smart. Tobias shook his head to clear it. Time to knock off the smartmouth.

"Main and auxiliary plants are down. Whatever it was that came flying through the hull took out the engines. I couldn't sell what's left of them for sc.r.a.p."

Another pause, this one longer. "What about the fuel cells?"

"They're okay. Osborn got the lines shut down before too much fuel escaped. What's Forrest got in mind?"

Forrest's voice entered his helmet. "We can try for a dead-stick landing. If you can rig the steering jets, Tobias, the computer says we have a chance of making it through the atmosphere."

"How much of a chance?"

Forrest laughed. "Don't ask." He became quiet. "We have a better chance at making a landing than we have trying to stay alive up here. Can you rig something?"

Tobias looked around the engineering deck, the challenges of practical necessity temporarily crowding out projections of disaster and demise. With the board shot there would be some wiring to do. He'd have to work off the batteries. And some plumbing, not to mention readjusting the steering jets to use main-plant fuel. He didn't really know if that could be done. But there was something else. The entry heat would turn aft engineering into a furnace.

"Forrest, I can make a try at the steering jets, but something has to be done about those holes in the hull."

"Get to work on the jets. When you're ready, I'll help you with the holes. We can s.n.a.t.c.h some plate from somewhere."

Tobias pushed up and began working his way toward aft engineering. He loved doing wiring in atmospheric long johns. It was like doing watch repair while wearing a pair of boxing gloves. The failing gravity would just make it interesting.

He punched the switch, and the hatch swung slightly open and jammed. With his foot he kicked it the rest of the way open. He stood in the hatch and looked into the darkness of the engine room.

The only light came from the holes in the hull. Tobias knew that some of those flickers were stars, but most of them were too bright for that. The bright ones were the remains of the crumbled planets that formed the Oids Belt in orbit around a sun called Mantchee.

Merchant crews don't like the Oids Belt and never go there. The union even got it in the contract. Asteroids, planetoids, and paranoids. Tobias still had one of the b.u.t.tons that says I AVOID THE OIDS.

But there were pa.s.sengers and parts to pick up and deliver to strange and wonderful places, and a pilot who believed in shortcuts more than he did in minimum safety or union contracts. Tobias swore that if he and the pilot managed to live through the landing, Tobias's first planet-side act would be to murder Mikizu.

First things first.

He returned, grabbed Osborn, and dislodged the engineering chief's body from the rapidly freezing fluids that were pinning his a.s.s to the deck.

Pulling the body to the hatch, Tobias pushed it toward the large hole at his feet.

The still form somersaulted slowly toward the hole and jerked to a halt. Tobias pulled the light from his belt and aimed the beam at the opening.

The back of Osborn's head had been speared and snagged by the hole's ragged edge. One of the thick splinters of metal protruded from Osborn's left eye.

Someday the geniuses will figure out how to puke in a s.p.a.ce suit. He turned away.

"this thing will serve us if we obey it"

"how will it serve"

"it will stop pain and death"

"this thing brought us pain and death"

"we must obey"

"this thing now wants us to kill"

"Forrest is still torturing the rocks." It was Lady Name's voice.

Tobias buried his head more deeply into his pillow. "If you don't get out of here, I'll rip out your spine and strangle you with it."

No footsteps moving away. He could feel the woman's hurt gaze on his back. The flimsy shelter almost radiated with terminal sulk. Tobias chased away his nightmares and rolled over on his cot. "Go away, Lady. Take up a hobby, go play with yourself, anything. Anything but tattling on Forrest. I don't find forty-year-old children amusing."

"I am not tattling, Tobias. I am reporting. One of your men is torturing the rocks. Those rocks are alive."

"Lady, first, they are not my men. If anyone is in charge, it's Forrest. Second, I don't care about the rocks. I really don't. My only problem is keeping sane until someone picks up our signal. Rescue, Lady. Think rescue."

"No one will pick up the signal. Forrest told you it can't get through the radiation."

"You don't know that. Forrest doesn't know that for certain. There's a chance."

She stared at him for a moment, almost looking sane, then nodded toward the shack's doorway. "What are you going to do about Forrest?"

He turned his back and burrowed into his pillow. "Nothing."

Footsteps, finally. .

The beacon signal would get through. It had to. Then a curious thought entered his mind. He felt he should be rooting for the beacon signal's success. A moral thing. What generations of humans would say was the thing he should be doing right then. The curious thought was that he didn't really care whether the signal got through or not.

soon the dark"

"soon we kill"

"it is the wish of this thing"

Mantchee rode half-hidden by the horizon. Tobias entered the main shelter, the red glare of the weeklong sunset casting the interior of the dome in blood.

They were all seated around the low table. Lady Name, as usual, was watching Forrest. Forrest was entertaining himself with his own thoughts while Tillson struggled, probably uncomfortable with the unfamiliar feeling of wearing clothes. Nelson Cage was heavily into a wiring diagram, the symbols and the problems their relationships represented providing as much entertainment for him as the rocks did for Forrest.

As he pulled a ration pack from the dispenser, Tobias heard Cage announce. "I have the computer working."

Tillson: "G.o.d doesn't like computers."

Lady Name: "What are you going to kill time with now, Cage?"

Forrest: "Break it, Cage. Break the computer and fix it again."

Cage's face flushed red. "I don't know what's wrong with you people. After five months of hard work I've managed to-"

Forrest leaned forward holding a finger before his lips. "Shhh." He brought his finger down and smiled. "No one cares, Cage."

Tobias lowered himself into the chair to Forrest's right, sipped at the acid-tasting hot beverage, and gnawed on a nutribar as Cage leaned back, his voice becoming brittle. "We can use the computer-"

"For what?" Tobias shook his head as he bit again at the nutribar. "Except for getting rescued, all our solvable problems are solved. We have oxygen, water, rations, and a livable temperature spread. The only things in short supply are patience and sanity. Do you have any games you can play on that thing? We could use some entertainment."

Cage snorted and sat back in his chair. "Games," he repeated in disgust. He looked over at Lady Name. "At least I know who you are now."

She looked away from Forrest for a split second. As she resumed her watch on the pebble persecutor she replied, "Cage, you haven't a clue who I am."

Cage smirked. "Barbara Striker. Doctor Barbara Striker. I managed to retrieve the pa.s.senger manifest. It says you are Doctor Barbara Striker, a biologist formerly with the Dison System colonization effort, currently relieved of your post because you are a f.u.c.king crazy."

"Words." She slowly turned her head toward Cage. "I'll be using the computer."

"You will not! I just finished repairing it."

Lady Name grinned as she stood and walked from the dome, obviously headed for the wreck and the computer. Cage leaned toward Tobias. "You must do something!"

Forrest chuckled and shook his head. "Calm down. Let her play with the machine. It's got to be better than having her perched like a vulture on my shoulder all the time."

"What if she breaks it?"

"Then you can fix it again. It really isn't very important."

Cage stood abruptly and walked rapidly from the dome. Again Forrest chuckled. "Cage is on his way to the ship to lay down the law to Lady Name."

"Yeah, and when she flashes that blade of hers he'll be back with a wet crotch." Tobias pointed with his thumb toward the door. "How come you aren't out playing with your rocks?"

"Things are arranged."