Elizabeth Bear: Scardown

Lieutenant Koske could remember precisely every detail of the last time he had made love to somebody. Remember the taste of his wife's mouth, and imagine the flavor of his tears when she left him three years later, unable to live with a man who couldn't bear an arm around his shoulders, a kiss on the cheek.

It could be worse. I could still be crippled. Or dead.

Would that be worse?

The hatchway opened as he slammed the bag again. He heard the footsteps and then the hesitation. “Lieutenant. I beg your pardon. I'll come back later.”

A young man's voice. He turned. The stocky, close-cropped blond lieutenant who stood just inside the hatchway tossed his towel around his neck and nodded. Koske took in powerful muscles under a crisp white T-shirt, shorts in air force blue, rubber-soled ship shoes.

“No,” Koske said, lowering trembling fists. Exhaustion rolled over him, the familiar dizzying drop out of adrenaline-fueled combat time. “I'll hold the bag for you if you like—”

“Ramirez. Chris.”

“I'm done.”

2200 Hours

Thursday 2 November, 2062

PPCASS Huang Di

Earth orbit

It wasn't as bad as it had been.

Of late, growing habituated to his body's precarious artificial equilibrium, Second Pilot Xie Min-xue found that his tendency to flinch and panic when confronted with casual contact was lessening. Rather than overreacting, he was learning to anticipate and avoid the contact before it could happen.

Also, the crew was learning techniques to make life easier for the pathologically high-strung pilots: incandescent lighting rather than fluorescent in most public areas of the Huang Di, for example. Soundproofed bunks for the pilots, and a private ready room where the lights were dim and the only sound the hum of the Huang Di 's systems. There had been some talk of removing the colored panels and ideographed plaques— long life, good harvest, fair sailing —that bid the Huang Di prosperity and success, but the first pilot had convinced the captain that such measures would not be necessary.

Just privacy, he said. And so Min-xue and the other four fragile, essential, half-mad pilots were granted the luxury of bunks and a ready room of their own.

A luxury that Min-xue had now abandoned to pass carefully through the weightless corridors of the drifting ship. Midwatch, the passageways were almost deserted. The ideal time for a young man suffering from an induced form of acute hypersensitivity to travel through them.

Min-xue paused by the hatchway to Pilot's Medical and closed his eyes for a moment. His uniform bound at waist and ankles; he jerked it irritably straight, which of course disarrayed the cloth across his shoulders and at his collar. There was no true comfort, but it could have been worse.

Min-xue opened his eyes, clutched a grab rail beside the door so reactive pressure wouldn't send him drifting into the corridor, and depressed the call plate beside the hatch. The doorway irised open. He swung himself through. “Master Technician?”

There was a deep sort of irony in the fact that the title of the man who cared for Min-xue's own tightly engineered systems was technician . Or perhaps Min-xue's superiors only meant to acknowledge the truth: he, and every other soldier in the People's PanChinese Liberation Army, was perfectly machined for a role, and perfectly replaceable.

“Second Pilot.” Master Technician Liu Paiyun released his webbing and drifted from his station, turning gracefully to face Min-xue. “Have you any problems today, or are you just here for your checkup?”

“None,” Min-xue answered. “Well, no more than the usual, but nothing to complain of.”

“Excellent.” The master technician rubbed the palm of a broad hand across his tight-cropped black hair and smiled in a way that made the corners of his eyes wrinkle tight. “Then come with me, Min-xue; after we finish with your physical, I'll conduct your quarterly psychological examination. As long as you're already here—”

“I'm not due for that for another six weeks,” Min-xue answered, and the master technician called up his chart.

“I know.” Paiyun had thick wrists, still well muscled despite free fall, and arms long enough that bare strips of skin showed below the cuffs of his uniform. Those wrists — and the big, blunt hands attached to them — moved with assurance through the projections, motions as deft as Min-xue's when the young pilot was at the Huang Di 's controls. “But we need a fourth for mah-jongg, you see. And there's no reason we can't combine two tasks into one.”

He glanced over his shoulder. Min-xue smiled. “Thank you, Paiyun,” he said. “That would be — very nice.”

The mah-jongg set was magnetic, the tiles softly burnished steel with a tendency to adhere to one another even when the player did not necessarily wish them to. Min-xue floated comfortably in a corner of Medical's crowded ready room, tethered to one padded wall by a length of soft webbing and a plastic clip. Liu Paiyun had carefully set things up so that Min-xue would have his back to the wall. Most gracious, but then Medical understood better than anybody except another pilot what, exactly, the pilots endured—

“—out of patriotism, Min-xue?”

“I beg your pardon, Paiyun?” It was nice to be on a casual basis with one person on the Huang Di, at least.

“Oh.” Paiyun shuffled his tiles. His broad fingertips left faint oily dapples on the metal. “If I gave offense, I'm sorry. I had asked”—he glanced to the other two technicians, Chen and Gao — both only seniors — for confirmation. Chen smiled. Gao nodded. — “why it was that you agreed to enter pilot training. Given the risks. An exemplary young man such as yourself.”

“They only take the best,” Min-xue said, without pride. He chewed his lip, feeling toward an answer that might make sense to Paiyun. “If my performance had not been acceptable—”

“That was not my implication at all.” Paiyun looked down, ostensibly to lay a tile on the board with a soft, magnetized click. China. Min-xue smiled at the boxy red ideogram.

“—no, Paiyun, I know it wasn't.” Min-xue let the smile widen. “It was the adventure, of course. And the idea that I might be good enough to be accepted. And—”

They let the pause hang in the air long enough to be notable. “And?” Gao said. He looked down then, as if afraid he had been rude to the pilot, and turned away to fetch another round of drinks in plastic bubbles.

“I'm a second child,” Min-xue said, enjoying the widening of his tablemates' eyes more than was probably fitting. He gripped the stem of the game board between his feet to keep himself from twisting as he accepted a bubble of cola from Gao. “There wasn't much place for me at home, and there was a girl, you see—”

“Ah.” Paiyun smiled. “This girl, you'll marry her when we go home, then?”

“I don't think so,” Min-xue answered, keeping his face impassive and strong. “I do not think she would like to be married to a pilot.”

“No?”

“No.” Firmly. He bit the valve on the cola and drank deeply. “No, not at all.”

The little group fell silent. Chen shuffled his tiles, click and hiss of steel against other steel.

Min-xue sighed and jerked his thumb toward the bulkhead behind him, and the cold deeps beyond it. “It's not so bad as all that, my noble PanChinese comrades and allies. This is more important. I'm doing this for her and for my sister, I think. So that their children have someplace to go.”

Paiyun blinked, releasing the valve on his own beverage. “You believe the stories, Min-xue? They're… Well. There is gossip, of course. But people have been hungry as long as there has been a China, and — well, there is always gossip.”