Zach Hughes - Deep Freeze

They remembered, they found that their taste in books and films was surprisingly alike, their politics straight down the conservative line, their taste in wine and food quite similar. It was difficult to get a good debate going because they thought so much alike. The only way David could get a rise out of his sister was to offer to make her life more comfortable, or more luxurious.

"Damn it, Ruth, I've got more money than I'll ever spend. Use it. Take a trip."

"I take one trip each year," she said.

"An excursion trip with a bunch of old maid schoolteachers."

"But that's what I am, an old maid schoolteacher."

"I'm sorry," he said.

"No reason to be. It has been my choice." She smiled, touched his hand.

"Why have you never married?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. Because I never found a girl as pretty as Sheba?"

She laughed.

"Or you," he said. "Never found a woman I could talk to the way I talk to you."

She was thoughtful for a few moments. "Well, old Dave, you may have put your finger on it. I kept looking for a man like you back in my salad days when I was considering an alliance, marital or otherwise. Could it be that the Webster twins are slightly warped?" She asked the question wryly, but a memory had burned its way through a sheath of deliberate forgetfulness. She was fifteen and she'd just been kissed by a boy named John Form, a rather handsome boy who had put his tongue into her mouth. She'd gone to her brother in puzzlement, for at the time it seemed distasteful and rather unsanitary, that tonguey kiss.

"Well, that's the way it's done, Sis," David had said. "It's called deep kissing."

"I don't like it," she'd said. "Do you?"

He had grinned and winked.

"Uggh."

"Maybe John Form didn't know how to do it right," he had suggested.

On impulse, he had pulled Ruth to him. "Let your lips part slightly." Shehad let her lips open. And a burst of sunlight glowed inside her as his mouth covered hers and his tongue sought hers and engendered response.

She had tried to hide her shameful reaction and apparently she'd been successful. She'd said, "Well, that's about the way John did it."

David was talking. She picked up his teasing line of thought again as he said, "If so, it's your fault."

"Pooh."

"For being the way you are. Caring, thoughtful, wise—"

"Wise? My God, that makes me sound ancient."

"—rather nice looking—"

"You say that only because we look so much alike."

"Comfortable."

"Ah, that's it. You're just too damned lazy to court a woman."

He grinned. "Could be."

It was not, by any means, the only time their talk had approached what would have been flirtation had they not been brother and sister. Now, decades after he had demonstrated the art of deep kissing to her, she asked herself, "Does he realize? Did he, too, feel a sun burst inside him with that kiss when we were fifteen?"

The Fran Webster blinked back into normal space at a distance of parsecs from the nearest star. "Oh, my God," Ruth said, as she looked edge on at the Milky Way. "Oh, dear God, how beautiful."

The fiery heart of the galaxy was a dazzling globe of diamonds, the bulge of it protruding on either side of the disc, the thinner disc stretching on and back from the ship's position.

"Now I do envy you," she said. "For having seen this before."

"But I haven't," he said. "This is my first time outside the galaxy, too."

He patted her on the shoulder. "No one I'd rather share it with."

"Thank you. Thank you for this."

"My pleasure."

"Can we just stay here for a while?"

"Sure. We have charge for another jump, but we can wait until the generator is full again."

She toyed with the optics, zooming in on the nearest stars so that she could appreciate the distance, then coming back, back, until once again the enthralling spectacle was spread out before her.

"Come along," David said.

"Where?"

"Out there," he said, pointing at the optic viewer.

"Yes. Yes," she whispered, thinking that he was merely being mystic, or poetic, but he took her hand and led her to the central lock, helped her climb into a shimmering E.V.A. suit. She shivered in anticipation and some fear as the inner hatch closed and she leapt convulsively when, with a wild hissing, the air evacuated from the lock and the other hatch opened to—space, darkness, cold that she could not feel but could imagine. She was incapable of movement. She made no effort to resist as David pulled her toward him, locked an umbilical to the suit and to his, stepped out into the void pulling her with him.

She screamed.

"That hurt my ears," he said, his voice perfectly reproduced by the suit's communicator.

"Take me in," she gasped, having difficulty breathing. They were drifting away from the ship, weightless. She felt helpless. She squirmed and reached out. The reaction to her sudden motion sent them spinning, together, to the end of the cords. They jerked to a stop.

"Ruth!"

His voice penetrated the haze of panic.

"I want you to look."

He turned her.

The galaxy was one vast, misty jewel over her head, hanging there, but not heavy, ethereal, so beautiful that she felt only awe, not fear.

She turned her head. The ship's hull was a metal wall behind her, seen dimly by the glow of the galaxy. Beyond was—nothing, a nothing so deep, so complete that she had to stare at it for a long, long time before she could see the dimmest little points of light, lights that were, she told herself, other galaxies as large as, larger, brighter than the glowing dream of beauty that hung over her head.

"My God, David."

"Yes."

"Still want to go in?"

"No, not just yet." She giggled. "I'm going to have to change clothes, but not yet." In her moments of sheer panic she had wet herself, but she felt no shame.

"You can feel it when you're out here," he said.

"That, sir, is exactly the kind of imprecise statement for which I would reprimand one of my students."

"Pardon me all to hell."

"But I understand exactly what you mean."

During a long silence she listened to her own breathing, her own heart pounding, let her eyes close partially to dim the glory of the massed stars.

"Time to go," David said.

"All right."

She matched his movements, pulling herself toward the ship along the thin cord that was all that prevented her from drifting away into the endlessness of the intergalactic void. Then they were in the lock and airwas hissing in.

Out of the suit, she kissed him on the cheek. "I think that is the nicest gift anyone has ever given me," she said. "Thank you."

The Fran Webster rested in solitude in a black sac seven parsecs inward from Rimfire's extragalactic route, having left total emptiness at the point where Dan Webster's Mule had made a left turn over a year ago.

David had checked the last inward pointing permanent beacon left by Rimfire, but no messages had been entered into the beacon's storage chambers. Now David sat on the control bridge with his feet propped up on the console, hands behind his head, staring at the optic viewer. A few widely spaced stars made faint dots in the blackness. Ahead, if he set the optics for maximum magnification, was the thickening glow of the dense areas far away, so far that measurements in thousands of parsecs were beyond the grasp of the mind.

Ruth came into the control room in a ship's uni-suit, something that she'd sworn never to wear. The tailored shorts showed her long, smooth, pale legs. The loose top hinted at the tipped cone shape of her breasts. The garment was revealing, but comfortable. She was brushing her sable-brown hair and her eyes were swollen from sleep.

"Why didn't you wake me?"