“Is the suit giving him IVs?”

“Yes.”

It was a comfort to remind herself that his spacesuit was not only a small flexible spaceship, but also a medical sleeve of considerable power, a kind of personal hospital.

“Wahram, are you there?” she said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m here,” he croaked. “I’m not all right.”

“What hurts?”

“My leg hurts. And I feel… sick. I’m trying not to throw up.”

“Good—don’t throw up. Pauline, can you get some antinausea into him?”

“Yes.”

They floated there in the starry night. Though Swan did not like to admit it, there was nothing more to be done at the moment. The Milky Way was like a skein of white glowing milk, with the Coal Sack and other black patches in it even more black than usual. Everywhere else the stars salted the blackness so finely that the black itself was compromised—as if behind the black, pressing intensely on it, was a whiteness greater than the eye would be able to take in. The pure black in the Milky Way must indicate a great deal of coal in the Coal Sack. Was all the black in the sky made by dust? she wondered. If all the stars in the universe were visible, would the night sky be pure white?

The big stars seemed to lie at different distances from them. Space popped as she saw that, became an extension outward rather than a backdrop hanging a few kilometers away. They were not in a black bag, but in an infinite extension. A little reckoning in a great room.

“Wahram, how are you feeling?”

“A little better.”

That was good. It was dangerous to throw up inside a helmet, not to mention unpleasant.

So they floated in space. Some hours passed. Their food came in the form of liquids one could suck from a straw in the helmet; there were even chunks of nutrition bars that could be extruded from an inside port in the cheek of the helmet, chewed off, and swallowed. Swan did both these. She peed into her suit’s diaper.

“Wahram, are you hungry at all?”

“Not hungry.” He didn’t sound comfortable either.

“Are you nauseated again?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not good. Here, I’m going to get us stabilized against the stars. You’ll feel some tugging. Maybe you should close your eyes until I get us settled.”

“No.”

“All right, it won’t be very fast anyway. Here we go.” She jetted against their spin; it was hard to do it with his weight added loosely to her side. Better to hug him and make him a front weight. She did that and gave him a tiny squeeze; in response he only made a little complaining hum. She got them stabilized to the stars, more or less, and pointed so that they were looking at Venus. It was still in shadow. If the sunshield had been wrecked, or even damaged, they would have seen it, she was sure; some crescent, or maybe one region suddenly blazing white; and as they had been on the side of the umbrella that would have been struck, it did not seem to her that any lit part of Venus could be entirely on the other side of the planet from them. Well, maybe it could; she was disoriented, she had to admit. But it looked like the attack had been foiled.

“Pauline, can you tell us what happened to the ship and the sunscreen and all?”

“Radio reports are still first responses, but they indicate a collision happened as foreseen, between the ETH Mobileand a pebble mob of roughly four times the mass of the ship. This was as predicted within an order of magnitude, and the ship was going faster than the pebbles by enough to knock the bulk of the collision mass at a vector angling away from the sunscreen.”

“So it worked.”

“Except part of the ejecta from the collision hit the craft near us, and its explosion spread fragments, one of which hit Wahram.”

“Yes of course. But that was just bad luck.”

“Several people on that craft near us must have died.”

“I know that. Very bad luck. Hit by shrapnel, in effect. But the sunscreen was saved?”

“Yes. And the sunshield’s defense system has apparently attacked the ejecta that flew in its direction.”

“So now it believes in the pebble mob.”

“Or at least in the impactors coming at it. I can’t tell what its problem was before.”

“Was it aware of this new fine-grained imaging system of Wang’s?”

“Wang told them about it, but they are a closed system, to avoid tampering. I don’t know if they had joined the new surveillance or not.”

“Maybe closed systems are easier to tamper with than open ones. Could it have been compromised?”

“It seems unlikely. It’s under the control of the Venus Working Group, and they are considered very intent on security.”

Wahram added nothing to this conversation. Swan held his hand, squeezing from time to time. There was nothing more for them to do. He squeezed back, briefly, then his hand went slack.

“You all right?” she asked.

“Fair,” he replied.

“Have you tried to eat something?”

“Not yet.”

“Drink something?”

“Not yet.”

They floated in black space, weightless and warm. They were like little moons of Venus; or like little planets of their own, orbiting the sun. People sometimes talked about this situation as the return to the womb, the amniotic high. Take some entheogenic drugs, become a star child. And in fact it was not as dreadful a sight as it probably should have been. For a few moments Swan even fell asleep. When she opened her eyes again, it seemed to her that Venus was perhaps a little bigger. It made sense; when they left the ship, they must have been going at quite a significant speed.

“You still there?”

“Still here.”

Well, Swan thought. Here they were. Nothing to be done, except to wait. Waiting was never her preferred mode. Typically there was more to do than she had time for, so that she was always in a rush. Now it seemed long for a rescue from an evacuation. As they had been bailing out, there had been talk of ships in the area. Maybe Wahram had been knocked off in a strange direction; Swan had followed without any sense of that. Possibly they were leaving the plane of the ecliptic, thus the path of any ships coming to the rescue. Maybe the poor destroyed yacht was the only one in their area, and they would have to wait until all the other evacuees had been mopped up. The destruction of the little yacht was likely to be one of the chief sources of casualties in the whole affair, so surely that would attract attention. They would know they hadn’t collected everybody; they would keep looking; these suits had powerful transponders in them. Being out of the ecliptic thus probably best explained the delay. Or maybe picking everyone up was just taking a while. The last acceleration of the ETH Mobilemight have meant it was going at a speed higher than most spaceships could reach when the last people left it, in which case the people were too. If everything was as it was supposed to be, then all the suits would support their occupants for ten days, and they had only been out there only, what—she had to ask Pauline—twenty hours. It seemed longer, shorter—she couldn’t tell. Venus was definitely a little bigger. Swan recalled stories of castaways, adrift unfound, frozen for the eons. How many had gone that way in the history of the world? Scores, hundreds, thousands? She heard in her head the chorus of the old Martian song:

I floated thinking of Peter

Sure I would be saved

But the stories lie

I’m left to die

Black space will be my grave

No doubt many of those unfortunates had drifted expecting till the end they would be saved. Hope drained away more slowly than the air and food in their suits; they would recall the story of Peter circling Mars, or some other marooned person who got rescued, and believe a little spaceship would presently appear and hover before them like a UFO, like redemption, like life itself. But for many it had never come, and at some last point they had had to admit that the story was false, or not true for them. True for others, but not for them; the others elect, they the preterite, the lost ones. The forgotten ones. Thus the stark Martian song.