Down In The Dark Part 3

"You going to tell me about the crayon things now?"

Silence, then she slowly shook her head.

I found myself thinking about the way she'd looked a couple of hours ago, offering her virtue to me like... h.e.l.l. Like a character in one of those silly romance vids Lisa was always watching when we... nothing in my head now but Christie with her suit liner zipped open, t.i.tties hanging out, eyes begging me to...

I felt my face relax in a brief smile.

Her eyes narrowed. "Who you going to tell?"

"n.o.body. I guess I was... reconsidering your offer." My own snicker sounded nervous.

Christie's face darkened and her eyes fell, clouding over with anger. Then she said, "I... I'm not steropoeic."

Not... I suddenly realized the magnitude of her bribe, what it might've cost her to make the offer.

And then I was picturing us together, crammed into the little bunk, maybe sprawled on the habitat floor, having cleared away junk to make a big enough s.p.a.ce.

Felt my breathing grow ever so slightly shallow?

Really?

No way to tell.

I said, "Sorry. I was just trying to... lighten things up. You know. I mean... when I saw you with that axe..."

She nodded slowly. "Are you really not going to tell?"

I shrugged. "What difference does it make?"

Eyes hooded. Keeping something to herself.

"You going to tell me?"

Long, shadowy look. Making up her mind about what kind of lie she might want to tell. The silence drew out, then there was that same little headshake.

I said, "Okay," then turned away and started getting into my suit, while she sat and watched. Every time I looked, there was something in her face, like she wanted to spill whatever it was.

Every time she saw me look, her face would shut like a door.

Once my suit was on and pressurized, I went out through the lock and was on my way.

I tried thinking about it rationally, all the long drive back, but I couldn't. All that kept coming into my head was, What difference can it make now? and, Why does she care?

Care enough to pick up an axe and consider splitting a doomed man's head.

There are fewer than two thousand people left alive in the entire universe. We are all going to die, sooner or later, when the tech starts to fail, when our numbers fall, the spare parts run out... when we all go mad and run screaming, bare-a.s.s naked, for the airlocks.

I pictured myself depressing the halftrack, rolling out the lock door, rising to my feet in G.o.dawful cold, taking a deep breath of ghastly air and... h.e.l.l. Can't even imagine what it might be like.

Like sitting in the electric chair, heart in your throat, senses magically alert, waiting for the click of the switch, the brief hum of the wires and... and then what?

We don't know.

Funny. Just a day ago, just yesterday, I thought I knew. Thought I wouldn't mind when the time came that I... yeah. Like Jimmy Thornton and his utility knife. Just like that.

I thought about getting myself a big bowl of nice warm water, sitting down on my bunk, all alone with the bowl between my legs, putting my hands and the knife under water, making those nice, painless cuts, watching the red clouds form.

Probably be a little bit like falling asleep, hm?

Jimmy looked asleep when they found him. Didn't even spill the water when he went under.

I crested the last hill before the base, Bonestell Cosmodrome coming over the horizon, and parked the halftrack on a broad, flat ledge at the head of the approach defile, wondering why the h.e.l.l my skin had begun to crawl.

TL-2 was on the launch pad now, tipped upright, fully fueled, her meilerwagen towed away. On Earth, a rocket like this is always surrounded by a falling mist of condensation. Here, where heating elements are used to keep the fuel from gelling, there's a narrow, rippling plume, mostly thermal distortion, going straight up.

Today, it only went up a few hundred meters, then was chopped off by wind shear.

As I watched, the engines lit, bubble of blue glow swelling between the landing jacks, TL-2's dark cone shape lifting slowly. There was a sudden, snarled blossom of red-orange fire spilling across the plastic as superheated hydrogen started combining with atmospheric components, nitrogen, miscellaneous organics, HCN a major combustion byproduct.

The flame was a long, beautiful tongue of blue-white-yellow-red, swirling like a whirlwind as it climbed against the orange-brown sky, pa.s.sing through first one layer of diaphanous blue cloud, then another, then disappearing, becoming diffuse light, then nothing.

She was on her way to Enceladus, I knew, where we'd found a few million liters of helium trapped in an old ice-9 cell, the precious gas one of the few things we couldn't make or mine on t.i.tan.

As I put the halftrack in gear, heading on home, I thought about what it would be like to try to live for the rest of my life on the Moon, Earth's moon, the only real Moon, dead old Earth hanging like an ember in the sky.

Maybe we're making a mistake.

Maybe they should all come here.

Driving under a featureless brown sky, surrounded by a blue-misty landscape of red-orange-gold, I tried thinking about Christie's little beasties again, but failed.

I wound up hiding in my room, staring at the bulkhead for a while, then turning on the miniterm, watching with alarm as the screen sparkled, choking with colored static for a moment before the menu system came up.

What will happen when the electronics go?

Will we all die then? Or try lashing up homemade replacements, try flying without guidance, try... there was a s.p.a.ce program before there were real computers. Men on the Moon, that sort of thing. That technology might have gotten us out here. Maybe not.

Nothing in the base library I hadn't seen a hundred times already, other than those last dozen episodes of Quel Horreur, the French-language sitcom that'd been all the rage right before the end. JPL wasted one of its last uplinks on that and... well, they knew. They must've known. What were they thinking?

Can't imagine.

I'd watched about thirty seconds of the first one, happy laugh-track, pale blue skies, white clouds, green trees, River Seine and Tour Eiffel.

Stayed in my room so I wouldn't have to deal with Jennah, who kept on looking at me as I stopped by the mess to pick up my dinner. Went to my room and then couldn't stop thinking about her, about the last time we'd... which led to thinking about Christie with her longjohns hanging open, offering herself up to a fate worse than death, then on to Lisa, sprawled in our marriage bed.

They say you can't really remember pain, remembering only the fact of it, not the precise way it felt. Maybe the same thing's true of happiness.

I hung like a ghost beneath the ceiling of a room that no longer existed, looking down on a naked woman whose touch, taste, feel, laughter I was already losing, grappling with the loss, struggling to reclaim the few bits and pieces I had left.

Sometimes I wonder why I ever left Earth. Maybe we could've been happy without the money. Maybe.

Regret, they say, is the most expensive thing in the world, but it's a lie. Regret is free; you get to have as much regret as you want. And then, when you're done wanting regret, you find it's yours to keep forever.

At some point while I was staring at the base library menu system, the remembered image of Lisa turned to the much fresher image of Jennah, damp and eager in my arms, then, somehow, to Christie, huge eyes beseeching.

The next day, I went on out to Workpoint 17, a drilling platform on the backside of Aerhurst ridge from Alanhold, sitting at the top of a long slope, giving a vista like nothing on Earth, or any other place I'd been, long, flat, fading into the mist dozens of kilometers away, like the greatest ski run you could ever imagine.

When I first got here, the sight of these vistas, wonderful and strange, made me think about all the places I'd been already, made me think about the red canyons of Mars, the rugged orange mountains of Venus, the soft black lava plains of the Moon.

Made me remember my first sight of Earth from s.p.a.ce, stark, incredible, white-frosted blue seen from the other side of the sky.

I remembered standing atop the terminal scarp of Terra Noursae, looking out over the Waxsea's unimaginable wasteland, and wondering if I shouldn't tell Lisa I was never coming home, that I'd keep on giving her the money, all the money, but she'd have to find another man to help her spend it, another man with whom to have those children we'd discussed.

Christ, they were talking about the moons of Ura.n.u.s back then! And me, I started thinking about what it'd be like to stand on a cliff ten kilometers high. Started thinking about the geysers of Triton, dim blue Neptune hanging in the black sky overhead...

It still had the power to make my insides cramp with desire.

Workpoint 17 was manned by two Russian women who'd been brought out from the Fore Trojans about two years back, a pair of stocky, blunt-faced, red-headed petroleum geologists from Kazakhstan, looking like twin sisters, maybe in their forties, maybe a lot older, who'd been knocking around the solar system for something like fifteen years.

They'd always been cut-ups, kind of fun to be around, always ribbing each other, ribald stuff half in English, half not, kidding about who was going to have me first and who'd have to take sloppy seconds, though I always figured them for lesbians.

It was inside their habitat, with its stark, vinegary smell, watching one of them getting out of her suit, broad rump poking up, seam of her longjohns starting to pull apart where the st.i.tching would soon give way, that I made some vulgar remark or another.

Irena, I think it was, looked at Larisa, owl-eyed with surprise, then back at me, making a wan smile.

"Uh. Sorry."

Irena stood up, facing me now, s.p.a.cesuit still cluttered around her ankles, and, very gently I thought, said, "Don't be. We've been worried about you."

Later, I sat in one of my parking places, high atop Aerhurst, on a crag of pure white ice projecting from where the beaten track crosses the low shoulder of a slumping, rounded peak, lights out, engines off, all but powered down, staring out the window.

In the distance, over the lowlands, was a torrential rainstorm, vast, flat, blue-gray cloud hanging under a darkened sky. The rainfall beneath it was like a pointillist fog, freckled with dots too little to see, somehow there nonetheless, an edgeless pillar of silver-blue blotting out the landscape beyond.

Atmospheric cooling.

Somewhere above the clouds, I knew Saturn was all but gone, turned to black, blotting out the sun. I looked up, trying to make out the shadow's edges, make out the ringplane backscatter, but the turbulence was too great today.

Maybe some other time.

Just what I'd thought of saying to Irena and Larisa, antic.i.p.ating an offer that never came. Still, it was nice to think of them worrying about me. As though I still mattered to anyone at all.

The comm light on the dashboard began to wink, an eye-catching sequence of red-blue-amber-green, one color following the other at quarter-second intervals, colors merging into a brief, bright sparkle. I reached out and touched a b.u.t.ton with the tip of my finger, spoke my call sign, and listened.

Christie's voice came out of a rustle of static: "Can you schedule me for a maintenance visit?"

Something about that voice, odd, nervous, reluctant, eager. Or maybe it was just my imagination. How much can you read into a voice turned to whispers by radio interference?

"What's wrong?"

Long pause.

"I'm not sure. Maybe the same as before, only worse."

Nothing much had been wrong before. A few toasted chips; nothing serious, nothing that couldn't have waited if I hadn't been... I scrolled my schedule, thinking about Christie, about her colored waxworks beasties, about...

I said, "I'm on a routine maintenance run through the automated geophone chain this side of the ridgeline. I can divert to your workpoint between numbers three and four."

"When?"

Urgency?

Nothing's urgent anymore.

I said, "Thirty-one hours."

Much longer pause. "Oh."

The disappointment was stark, bursting right through the static.

She said, "I guess that'll be okay."

"See you then."

I punched the b.u.t.ton and sat back to watch the rainstorm build as the sky grew slowly darker above it, taking on the rich colors of mud.

What can have happened? What can she be wanting? Something to do with the melted-crayon things? Certainly not anything to do with me. My thoughts strayed again to her zipped-open longjohns, making me smile at myself. I'd never been one for a one-track mind. Not in this lifetime.

But funny things happen when life's reduced to terminal stress.

She was waiting, suited up outside, standing by the powerplant, when I rolled up to the workpoint, scrunching into the airlock, cycling on through. I've seldom been inside a halftrack while someone else is coming aboard; the hollow thumping of knees and feet on metal and plastic, the odd lurchings, were all very unnatural.

The inner hatch popped open, filling the cabin with a faint alcohol and ammonia tang, quickly suppressed when Christie opened her helmet, folded it back, pushed aside by human gastrointestinal smells.

I remembered an old story where that'd been the smell of t.i.tan, because its author was thinking of methane and swamp gas, barnyard smells and all.

Silly.

They put butyl mercaptan in natural gas so you'll smell a leak.