Marion Bradley - Survey Ship

Teague went back to Ching, who was picking at the food he had brought her. “You look tense,” he said gently. “Here, let me rub your neck.” He leaned over her, his firm fingers kneading the tight muscles, feeling her relax, gradually, under his hands. He kept on massaging, transferring the smooth motion down between her thin shoulder blades, and after a bit persuaded her to lie down on the seat, bending over her to knead her back muscles.

She said drowsily, “I’ll fall asleep if you keep doing that.” She was amazed at herself; once again, her body was betraying her, not this time with sickness, but with a flood of warmth, of lazy, sensuous awareness; she felt that she could lie here forever, with Teague’s hands moving on her body.

He leaned over and whispered, his warm breath tickling her ear, “I’ve got a better idea.”

Momentarily Ching went tense under his hands; then, still mesmerized by the caressing movement, she thought, Why not? Her body was very alien somehow, she felt she did not recognize it. She let him scoop her up, half-carry her to the door; he held her as they floated through the free-fall corridor.

I cannot trust my body, I cannot trust the computer. But I feel I can trust Teague. Why not? And then, defiantly, Why should I be the only woman in the crew who doesn’t know what it is to have sex with a man?

But in her own cubicle, as he was gently taking off her clothes, a wave of diffidence, of awareness of her own difference, overcame her again.

“Listen, Teague,” she said shyly, “I’m not sure I — I mean, I’ve never done this before, I’m not sure I’ll — well, know how. Except, you know, sort of theoretically. Do you mind?”

Teague was overcome with sudden warmth and sympathy. He bent close, kissing her, gently prying open her inexperienced lips. He whispered, “No, Ching, I don’t mind at all.”

It was Ravi and Moira, in full EVO gear, who approached the building designated the gym through the free-fall corridor, this time slowly, holding to the crawl bar. There was a flaring red light, indicating airlessness and vacuum beyond, and the sphincter had locked automatically, isolating the damaged module. Ravi sealed the first sphincter of the free-fall corridor, so that the corridor could function as an airlock in this emergency, then thrust the tool into the sphincter lock and twisted the lock free. The red light was still blinking.

His pressure-suit audio sounded loud in his own ears.

“Here we go. Let’s see what kind of damage we have.”

Ravi heard in the audio the sharp breath Moira drew, as the door opened; almost a cry, as if the damage were to her own body. A gaping hole flared in one edge; the meteorite or whatever it had been, had impacted them at tremendous velocity, ripped straight through the module, destroying the rowing-machine Teague had been using as if a bomb had struck it, then, deflected, richocheted and gone out, leaving a surprisingly small hole not really very far from the point of entry.

“Well,” he said, trying to make light of it, “looks like we’ve got a leak in the roof, in here.”

Moira giggled; a small, somehow disconsolate sound. Then she noticed that the debris was still lying all over the “floor” of the room, the painted running-track; Ching’s ballet barre had been broken by a flying fragment of the rowing machine, holes gouged in the sanded and varnished surface, mats flung about. But the debris lay on the “floor,” not strewn, drifting, all over the module.

“There’s still gravity in here.”

Ravi said, “That’s right, the DeMags are still on.” He had hoped to find them turned off, damaged by the impact perhaps; then he could have attributed the former DeMag failure to accidental jarring or damage to the control, a hypersensitive control dial.

“Good thing too,” Moira said. “Otherwise we’d have to run an obstacle course through floating debris, or tie everything down, before we could start repairing the damage to the module.”

“Why couldn’t we just have turned it on — oh, that’s right; we couldn’t trust it not to jolt on hard, the way it did the other day, and everything come raining down hard on top of us,” Moira said. “Actually I’m beginning to think the trouble isn’t in the DeMags themselves but in the backup system, the fail-safe.”

“I’m not sure,” Ravi said. “I trust your intuition about machines, certainly. But if that’s so, why the failure in the music room the other day?”

“Well, we’ll have to check it out,” Moira said absently. She was not thinking of Ravi at all, and somehow he felt cold, deserted and lonely. He had known this woman’s body, he loved her and cared about her; yet now, facing desolation and destruction and the awareness of barely-escaped death — for if they had all been in the gym, some of them would certainly have been killed — he knew that he was less important to her than the pieces of Teague’s destroyed rowing-machine, which she was dragging together, trying to lay them out like the broken pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

Moira does not love me, not as Jimson and Peake loved; she does not try to see God in me. I wanted to see her that way, to feel that the love between us was a little echo of the Cosmic Love which I am aching to know. But since the meteor struck, I am nothing to her. Ravi set his teeth, grimly accepting this; Moira was not his property; she had given him sexual access to her, body, and since she had the right to give it, he knew that the ethics to which he had been reared demanded she had also the right to withdraw it, without any reason given, unconditionally. But he hungered for her, physically, and he felt a deeper desolation which, he knew, had nothing to do with lust, its frustration or satisfaction.

“I’d think we might as well put it into the recycier for molecular conversion,” Ravi said. “It’s certainly not worth the trouble of repairing.”

She shook her head. “It wouldn’t be all that much trouble; and we don’t have the kind of machine tools we’d need to duplicate it,” she said. “I’ll have a go at it, later, when there’s time. We’ll need the gravity off in here to go up and repair those holes in the ceiling; let’s secure this for free-fall.”

He helped her rope it up, stowing it carefully so that the broken parts would not drift around in free-fall. The damage assessed, they went to the storage modules for patching material, summoned Teague to help them (Teague being, physically, the heaviest and strongest of the crew) and turned off the free-fall. Over the next two ship’s days they hammered repairs in place, refilled the module with air, tested the seals and sprayed fiberglass paints over the room, finally sanded and refinished the floor. Even the DeMag units tested out perfectly, and when they were finished, Ravi suggested a celebration.

“What are we celebrating?” Moira asked good-naturedly. “Not that it matters; we don’t need an excuse to throw a party. We could celebrate the passing of the orbit of Saturn.”

“Now that sounds like a good idea,” Teague said, “I’m eager to get some good, close shots of the rings—”

“We won’t be going too close,” Ravi told him, “the rings could be as dangerous as the asteroid belt!”

“I guess what we’re celebrating is being well out of range of the asteroid belt without any more damage,” Teague said, “or maybe celebrating whatever music we were playing that kept us out of range of the gym during that off-time!” During the two days past, they had meticulously stopped work only for the shared music session — all of them had an unspoken agreement that this was the one daily structure to their lives that would be violated only in the gravest of emergencies — but they had slept and eaten and done any other work aboard the Ship at odd hours.