“It won’t, for a while. So say the medics, anyway. Thing is, we never had this exact injury before. The other guys got out of those surges. You should’ve been able to get away from it. Nothing special about that surge.”
“It … got by me, I suppose. I won’t let it happen … ”
“I’m afraid this takes you permanently off manual tasks, Nigel. No way I can let you stay on the roster.”
He could think of nothing to say, and in any case he could hardly sort out the confusion of distorted impulses his senses brought him. He gazed out the exop door. People were clustered around, listening as a medic talked in a low whisper. He felt tears trickling down his face. He had lost something, some inner equilibrium; his body was not the same tuned instrument he had come to take so easily. A wracking sob came from him. He searched among the people and in the back, a point of calming rest in the bunched faces, he found Nikka. She smiled.
FOUR
Nigel’s recovery was slow. It was a long time before he could work again in the fields, harvesting, grunting with the effort and trying not to show it. But he liked the work and kept at it. It reminded him of moments in his past when, intent on some worrisome task, he would by chance press a finger to his wrist and feel, like a sudden reminder, the patient throb of his pulse, a steady note that lifted him out of fretful details.
But his internal confusion did not go away. He was enough of a mechanistic thinker to see that sudden jolts to the entire body could act on the mind in unknown ways. The glacial steadiness and resolve he had had since Marginis was now faltering, leaving him with strange, drifting anxieties.
About his own mental states he had never had any theories. He had refused to endorse mystical savants back Earthside. That lot had quite neatly done a job on Alexandria, thank you. More to the point, he could not speak for anyone else. Things happened to you and you learned from them whether you knew it or not but a pretense of a common interior landscape which could be described, a bloody touring book of the soul—that was a lie. No flat formulas could capture the human interior. Kafka, that gnarled spirit, was right: Life is defined by the closed spaces of the self.
That was why he had all along declined to become a savant figure himself, interpreter of the long-dead aliens of the Marginis wreck. He would have lost himself that way, when the whole point was to remain a man, to stay in the gritty world and experience it directly, avoiding abstractions. He knew that this made him appear increasingly isolated, cranky, out of step with the younger crew. But he did little to temper this, and used what pull he could when Nikka drew an assignment working on Lancer’s skin, to repair the ramscoop fields. Ted Landon made the quite reasonable point that he could not run a ship according to the loves of the crew. Nigel retorted that with the frequency of sex changes in the crew, it was bloody difficult to tell who was inclined to do what, and to whom. It came to him, then, why Ted smiled benignly on all the self-alteration that was so fashionable in Lancer.
“He’s got the game down, clean and simple,” Nigel said to Carlotta one evening. “People cloning new tissues, people socketed into machines more and more to up efficiency—so’s they can have more time off for their pursuits, preoccupation. My God! In a fad-driven society like Lancer, Ted looks reassuringly steady. Marvelous, ol’ Ted—let him keep a hand on the helm while we go off and console ourselves for the long voyage.”
Carlotta shook her head. “Makes no sense. The directives on involution therapy—that’s the term, don’t wrinkle your nose—came from Earthside. Ted had nothing to do with—”
“Nonsense. Look at that thing you’re drinking. Carbonated cherry frappé, seething along with microicebergs of orange floating in it. Where’d the resources for that come from?”
She stirred the silky drink. “Chem section, I guess.”
“Fine old Ted could stop such diversions if he wanted, never mind Earth. No, he’s in favor of a holiday air, a regression into—”
“Regression! Look, You may think—”
“Yes, I do. Surely we needn’t go into it?”
“It’s hard for me to see how you can deny a person a right to, a chance to … to find new definitions of themselves.”
“I’m simply trying to understand friend Ted. I’m aware that sex change became common Earthside as a method of helping adolescents with their sexual adjustments. And that the pursuit of variety has made it much the fashion back there. But here—”
“I think it’s pretty great of Ted and the others to allow use of ship’s resources for it. That certainly shows him in a, a fair-minded light.”
“Or alternatively, in an engagingly frank and surprisingly open-minded light. It’s always one light or another with him, you’ll find.”
“You’re just being cynical,”
“Um. ‘Cynical’ is a term invented by optimists to describe realists.”
“You’re impossible.”
“Um. Usually.”
A month passed without his particularly noticing it. One evening when Carlotta came by he muttered a greeting and went back to watching a three-dimensional color-factored Fourier picture of the EMs signals. They still remained damned nearly opaque to him. He was getting a hint of some earlier history, of their brief flirtation with spaceships and astronomy. There was something like poetry here, a suggestion of a fractured time, glimmers of the beings who had mustered the strength to remake themselves.
“How do you think we should vote on this case coming up?” Nikka asked.
—fragmented sprockets in the signal there— “Uh, what?”
“This woman who stole all those shipcredits.”
“How?”
“False indexing, of course.”
“What do you say, Carlotta?”
“She’s guilty as sin.”
“Um. Always wondered what that meant. What’s sin supposed to be guilty of?”
—made one wonder if the pre-EM culture had ever gotten out of its own solar system, these images here, could mean outward-stretching limbs or tracers to other stars or a whacking great blowoff of dandelion seed for that matter—
“Take it from me, she did it.”
“Um. So the tribunal said.”
“The whole crew has to decide what to do about her, though,” Nikka said.
—crew’s rattled more than they know with this continual stream of bad news from Earth, Swarmers everywhere, even the chemicals don’t seem to work on them, and meanwhile the work goes on in orbit above the blighted oceans, building the starships, using self-programmed machines to do the scutwork, mankind getting ready to burst out like dandelion seeds among the stars, a runaway effect—
Carlotta said, “I think she should be stored away in the Slots.”
“That’s no punishment,” Nikka said.
