Marion Bradley - Survey Ship

“Well,” Fontana said, “I know the books say it’s inevitable that you’ll mourn over the death of a relationship. I guess we’ve simply got to let you mourn. But I suspect that’s why they don’t encourage us to have relationships like that.”

Peake wondered how she had managed to say that without even a hint, in her voice, of you should have known better, but somehow she managed it, and it encouraged him to ask:

“Fontana, was it wrong of us to want to be together?”

“Wrong? How can I say? Unwise, certainly. They’d have separated you, anyway, after graduation. There was never even a fighting chance you could have made it together on to a Ship. A Ship’s company can be as few as four people; it would put an unholy strain on the other two, if the first two were a committed couple. There has to be room for outside commitment — sharing, affection, caring, with everybody on the crew,”

“Then why did they take me?” Peake flared, “since, unwise or not, I was committed?”

And suddenly Peake faced what he really felt. It was not parting from Jimson which had hurt too much. That parting had been inevitable, he had already known that, he had begun to suspect that the parting was already overdue.

“What hurts, is guilt,” he mumbled, “guilt that I was the one to go and he was the one to stay.”

And the memory still hurt, that moment when Jimson had flung it at him, Do you think they’re going to take a pair of queers? Against that memory he said, still defensive, “Then why in hell would they take me? I’m not going to fit in much better than one half of a — of any committed couple. It’s not as if I’d been the only homosexual in the Academy. There was Fly. And Duffy. And Janet.”

Fontana shrugged. “What can I tell you? I don’t think it made any difference, any more than I think they picked Moira because they needed a cello for the string quartet. Homosexuality is a legitimate lifestyle option — there are years when it’s been a plus quality, when there was an all-male crew…. Survey Ship number seventy-two was all-male, and I think seventy-nine was all-female. There were a couple of other all-male crews, too. One year — I read this in psychology — there was a crew where the top seven just happened to be males, and they sent an all-male crew. Compulsive heterosexuality would have been pointless on a crew like that. No, with Jimson it was something else. He was — he was so damned defensive about it. Do you remember Duffy? He made a point of bragging that he’d never had a woman and never would. There are professions where that lifestyle could be an asset. But not on this particular Ship.”

“Then why did they take me?” Peake wondered, but Fontana had no answer. She said, “I don’t know, Peake. Maybe they supposed you were flexible enough to adapt, to — to live and let live. Or thought, maybe that you were strong enough to live that way. I just don’t know. But whatever they thought, they knew Jimson couldn’t — and since even I knew that, I guess it’s probably the best they could do.”

Slowly, painfully, Peake nodded. In his deepest despair, it would never have occurred to him to call himself — far less someone he loved — queer. He had loved Jimson without reserve, had not hesitated to define himself, at least in relationship to Jimson, as homosexual. But he had never thought that he would be thus defining himself for all time, and certainly he had never guessed at the reservoir of self-hate that had led Jimson to fling that insult at him — or at their love. And self-hate, he realized, would be about the most dangerous trait possible aboard a Survey Ship.

“I guess I really knew that all along. Thanks, Fontana.”

She shrugged that off. “I guess I’m crew shrink, at least by default, and I figured it might be healthier to talk about it now than waiting six months and digging it out like a festering sore.” She stood up. “Listen, you sing bass, don’t you?”

“I can, provided it doesn’t go too far below a low G — I never flattered myself I could sing Boris Godunov,” he said amiably, relieved at the change of subject. “Why?”

“There’s a mass in five voices by Byrd that I’d like to try. Ravi has a good tenor, and Ching’s voice is beautiful, when she’ll be bothered to sing at all. And I’d like to establish the principle of equal time for vocalists around here. Listen,” she said, raising her voice to include them all, “tomorrow, when we get together, can we try the Byrd Mass in Five Voices?”

“Fine,” Teague said. “The music’s in the computer, isn’t it?”

“I’ll play continue,” Moira said, “I don’t sing. I’ll play cello continue, or piano — I mean keyboard — or turn the music, or sit and be an appreciative audience. But I don’t sing.”

“Why not?” Ravi demanded.

“Because female tenors, in general, sound considerably less attractive than male sopranos — which probably isn’t fair, but happens to be a cultural fact. And I have a range of half an octave, all in the tenor register,” Moira said, loosening the strings of her bow, and storing it in the case. She slid it over toward the wall, then turned and asked, “I suppose we’re going to keep full gravity in here?”

“I don’t see any objection,” Teague said, “but there are going to be parts of the ship where we can’t; I think we all ought to get into the habit of securing everything as if we were going to be in free-fall. Then we’ll never have to stop and ask ourselves whether we have to.”

“I don’t think that makes much sense,” Ching objected, but she stowed her viola in the racks and fastened the net over it. Fontana, helping Moira with hers, scoffed, “I don’t believe a word of all that stuff about your voice, Moira. How did you manage to get through sight-singing class when we were all twelve years old?”

“Faked it,” Moira said curtly, “sang falsetto.”

Ravi leaned over her, lightly touching her hair. He said softly, “With a male soprano, one might be in — in some legitimate doubt about his fundamental nature, or the validity of his — shall we say, vital equipment? It doesn’t seem fair, does it, that a low voice in a woman should be the complete embodiment of sensuality — like yours.”

“That’s a common mistake,” said Fontana, and for a moment Ravi was irritated — his words had been addressed to Moira, not a part of the common discussion. Then long training and natural good nature triumphed, and he said, smiling, “I’m probably sensitive on the subject; my voice changed late and as a tenor my virility was in doubt until I was fifteen or so — I don’t mean from the medics, only from the others in the class.”

Moira said, with a chuckle which reached only his ears, “You certainly have made up for lost time, haven’t you, darling?”

Peake, who had heard Ravi’s words but not Moira’s, said, carefully securing a net around his violin, “There was a countertenor who gave a concert in Sydney; Jim-son and I had permission to fly in and hear him; it was the same week Zora left us. He had a voice which was pure soprano — higher than yours, Fontana. And he was a big, blonde, hairy-chested man, and we heard that he was married with five children or so — came from one of the thinly populated enclaves. Iceland, somewhere like that.” After he had spoken, he realized that for the first time he could remember, he had spoken Jimson’s name without even a momentary twinge of that despairing guilt.

Had Fontana lanced that wound? Or was there some mystical awareness of the space, the enormous and widening distance between them, which made it, suddenly, seem as if Jimson were someone he had known a long time ago…? Peake was not sure; he felt a twinge of regret at his own fickleness, but he recognized that as mere self-pity and grinned.