Memor said, not without some pleasure, “They are afraid not of us, but of the humans.”

PART IV

SENDING SUPERMAN

Nothing fails like success, because we do not learn anything from it. The only thing we ever learn from is failure. Success only confirms our superstitions.

—KENNETH BOULDING

FIFTEEN

It was possible to exercise at Earth gravity on SunSeeker, just by jogging six-minute kilometers in the direction the deck was rotating. Beth sweated but didn’t make that speed, running on the spongy turf and sucking down the chilly ship air that always seemed to taste faintly of oil. An hour into her slogging, choppy run she felt better in the odd way that returning to good gravs did—a sensation of solidity, of the body’s chugging machinery settling back into its groove. If she ran fast in the same direction the deck rotated, she increased her speed of rotation, and so increased her weight. She reversed for her hard-pounding finish. Going fast against the rotation, she nearly floated like some sticky angel on air, her bare feet barely skimming the soft fabric. She sped around the outer habitat circumference in her shorts and sopping T-shirt and lurched into the showers, gasping and happy.

The shower next to her went on. She leaned around the corner and saw a finger snake wriggling in the spray.

“Phoshtha?”

“Hello, Beth. This device is delight.” The thin, sliding voice somehow fit the dancing eyes.

“Yes, but do not use it too often. We can’t recycle the water very fast.” Beth stepped back in and turned the shower on, a giggle tickling her lips. The finger snakes had no sense of privacy.

She got herself in order, feeling much better. Exercise calmed, made her world brighter. Ready for Redwing. Maybe.

Ten minutes later she rapped on his door. He was wedged behind his desk, leaving her more room in the narrow captain’s cabin. His wall display showed the slowly passing infinities of Bowl landscapes—at the moment, low mountain ranges in a low-grav region, with cottony cloud masses stacked above them. She had seen such clouds from below while swinging through the spindly trees on vines of thin, flexing strength. The clouds were nearly as tall as Earth’s entire atmosphere, and from the ground looked like an ivory cliff that tapered away to a speck.

“Hope you’re feeling better,” Redwing, rising—unusual for him, indeed—to shake her hand. “Admirable performance down there. I’d like to get some background from you, away from the others.”

“I think if we met as a group and—”

“A unit commander always reports first.” Redwing’s crusty face wrinkled into a grin, but she knew beneath the wry, leathery look he was absolutely serious.

“Oh.” Back in the navy we are, yessiree.

“Before we get to specifics, bring you up to speed, I want to know what it was like down there.”

She was prepared for this, because the shipboard crew all asked the same thing. They had spent months eating canned food and breathing desiccated air, gazing down at a whole vast thing gliding by, like having a terrific top view and no way out of your cramped apartment.

Still, she struggled to put the experience into words. Wonder, terror, hunger, spurts of fear, aching weariness fringed with a lacing anxiety that every time you closed your sticky eyes and fell into sweaty sleep, you could wake to find yourself about to die … “A tailored wilderness. For days you forget you’re not on an alien planet but on the skin of a furiously rotating machine. The star is always there and after a while, even after you’ve learned to sleep in shade and heat, you hate it. Darkness—I can’t tell you what a luxury it is to turn out the light. There’s weather, for sure, lightning that seems to be sheeting yellow all around you, and the jet—like a golden snake twisting across the sky. Always on the run, looking to see if something’s coming up on your tail to eat you, going for days without a bath, running without water even, feeling your steps get lighter because you’ve lost weight without even noticing it, hunger being sometimes the only thing you can think about—”

She made herself stop. With the crew she had been able to hold back but here, with Redwing, she couldn’t … and realized that something in the smile, his head nodding as she spoke on and on, the eyes dancing with interest, had made it happen. How did he do that? Maybe it was something you had to learn, from commanding ships all over the solar system.

“I know some of that,” he said, face now open and eyes far away. “You don’t get to pick the nightmare that wakes you up at four A.M.—it comes looking for you, again and again.”

This was a startling moment, taking her unaware. He was a man in a hard place to be, and she read in his gentle downturned smile a rueful regret that he could not possibly, as captain, go down there.

She made herself sit up straight, regain some composure. Keep your smile in the upright and locked position. “My mom used to say, a truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.”

He laughed, a hearty, full-throated roar in the metal echo chamber of his cabin. “Good one! Damn true, this whole thing is a detour.”

This last sentence came out of nowhere, with baritone notes of regret. He sat back and took a moment to see the mountain range far below slide away on the wall, a huge glimmering eggshell blue sea lapping against the mountains’ slate gray slopes along a narrow beach.

He knows how to pace this conversation, let it breathe.

He swiveled back to gaze at her with deep blue, penetrating eyes. “Tell me about … the food.”

She held her breath for a long moment, comparing the bland, warm forgettable dishes she had wolfed down in ship’s mess, realizing that while she ate eagerly it left no trace of memory. “I … there was something we could shoot out of the trees, when we were desperate. A fat primate thing, in the low-grav region. Stringy meat, yellow fat, looked like a big roasted monkey, but when you’d gone two days without anything but a kind of thick-leaved grass, it was … heavenly.”

“Taste human?”

“How the hell would I know?” Then she saw he was grinning, and laughed. “Not that I would’ve cared.”

“You could digest it?”

“Surprisingly, yes. Of course, we had all the biotech compatibility injections and a handful of pills. I had all of us start taking them as soon as the aliens—they call themselves the Folk, just like primitives on Earth—gave us food. We held out on our own rations for a while, then I had us cook the live game they gave us—”

“Live?”

“Yes. They were smart enough to let us prepare it our way, which they watched closely. We dispatched them with our lasers. Simmered some, with some herbs tossed in, it stayed down pretty well. But once, when we were hiding near somebody—something—searching for us in the tall tree region, we ate fish, raw. In fact, I had to be still and not give us away, afraid to get out my knife or laser, so I ate it while it was … alive.”

“Not for long, I bet. Sashimi still moving.”

“Unpleasant … for me and for the fish.”

“You all lost weight.”

“Even after eating yummy dried worms, very ripe, like sticky Jell-O. Live antlike things, as big as dogs in the low-grav zone. Crunchy embryos in the shell, tasted good but I felt horrid after it, dunno why. A fried scorpion-like thing, two tails. The head was bitter but I ate it anyway.” She paused; it came back so easily.… “Trying to forget that one. Bizarre, memorable.”

Redwing smiled fondly. “Hey, I ate haggis once in Edinburgh. So … uh, thanks.”

She blinked. Thanks for what? Then she saw; the yucky food made him yearn to go down there a little less. And he had gotten her to unload some, too, get some of it behind her. A ship’s captain is always about moving on.