Murasaki, page 4
But Nicole let him take the controls. Partly because she had some private business to attend to in the lander’s little sanitary room, mostly because she could see how desperately he wanted it... and because she knew how unlikely it was that Kammer’s wants for the future would ever be satisfied.
3
Chujo was cold, because its thin air didn’t trap much heat from Murasalci, whereas Genji had been hot because its murky miasma did. They landed on a mesa, just on the bright side of the dawn terminator.
There were some really impressive mountains off to the east, and their landing site was on the shoulder of another one.
As soon as they were out of the ship they were both giggling. Chujo felt good. On Genji everyone weighed half again as much as Earth-normal; on Chujo only a fraction of that—good news for spacers.
Or even for ex-Martians. On Genji you had to wear a pressure suit at low elevations, unless you wanted to wreck your metabolism and cough your lungs out, like poor, foolish Murqhad Fasbar. And on Chujo, at least at this elevation, all you needed was a nose mask to supplement the tiny partial pressure of oxygen, and then you could roam anywhere you liked. Almost.
“This is fiuz!” Aaron Kammer called to his ex-wife over the noise of the buggy as they rode it up to the for-mation that might, or might not, be ruins of some kind. Laughing, she agreed with him. It was so good to see Airy happy again!
Nicole was pleasPd with her landing, too. It had been a piece of cake, and all the time they were setting up to explore—deploying the plastic shelter, fitting each other’s nose masks, reporting in to sullen Captain Washington up in orbit in the big ship—she was conscious of the way her onetime husband kept looking at her. She liked it. It was pleasurably exciting to be alone with this sweet, sad (and not at all disgustingly fat) man she had once been married to. Being alone together had rarely happened since the di-vorce. She wondered, not in the least apprehensively, if he would make any sort of sexual advances to her. She was pretty sure he might, and anyway she had resources of her own.
But there was business to attend to. Nicole had not forgotten that there was a world to explore, and that it was Airy’s first. Everyone else on the ship had had some ex-perience of that on Genji. Only Kammer had been left out, because Boulat Kotsvili’s tests had warned that his dam-aged body couldn’t take Genji’s extra gravity. Nicole could see her ex-husband’s excitement, and was only mildly dis-appointed to be aware that iit had little to do with her. Mostly it was the thrill of at last doing the thing they had all come so far to do—doing it himself, in the flesh. Before they had gone a kilometer he could sit still no longer. “I can climb faster than this,” he told her, and before she could stop him he was out of the buggy and trotting up the hill.
“Be careful!” she called, meaning, For God’s sake, Airy, don’t kill yourself this first time! But he only waved over his shoulder and kept on trotting.
The valley had broadened out into another broad meadow, twenty or thirty hectares of low yellow bushes. Nicole followed with the camera on Aaron as he ran over to touch them and came back with a handful of purplish berries the size of plums. Nicole wrinkled her nose under the mask. “What’s that smell?”
“I guess it’s the plants. They do smell pretty high,” her admitted, “but I bet these are food for.
something.”
“Something small and harmless, I hope,” she said, but she was smiling as he dropped them in the buggy and turned to rape ahead again.
They were following a nearly dry rivercourse up the mountain, with yellow-green forests on both sides. It wasn’t much of a river, just an icy-cold trickle from the glaciers high on the peak, but it made the closest thing to a roadway for them. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a very straight road. Nicole could only keep track of Kammer for a few minutes before he was out of sight on a bend of the stream.
She did what she was supposed to do, though. She guided the buggy with one hand and operated the camera with the other pictures of the stream, pictures of the rocks it flowed through, pictures mostly of the curious trees—well, treelike things—that grew all around them. They would have to get samples of those trees, too—leaves, wood, fruit, and flowers if they had any. But she didn’t want to stop now, because she didn’t want to leave Kammer too long alone. On the way back would be plenty of time.
Peering ahead, she could make out glimpses of the odd formation they hoped might once have been a “city.” If it was, it certainly didn’t have any inhabitants any more. It had been visible enough to pick out from the orbital weans because it was exposed on a hillside. For the same reason, it was pretty well erased by time now. A thousand dust storms had eaten away most of the structure in Chujo’s high winds; landslides from the slopes above had buried most of the rest of it.
Of course, there might still be some kinds of animals living in the ruins.
So she was relieved when the buggy nosed around a final bend and she could clearly see the oddly straight-lined rock formations they had picked out from space. She killed the motor and got out to join Aaron, lugging the camera. He was out of sight, but with the motor off she could track him by the crack of his geologist’s, hammer as he took samples of some rock or other.
It was all stone—several different kinds of stone. Nicole was not geologist enough to identify them at a glance, but one white stone was, veined like marble, another a dull scarlet, another black as onyx.
,
There wasn’t any doubt about it any more. Long be-fore she reached Kammer she knew what he was going to say, because she had confirmed it for herself—the low walls, the unnaturally rectilinear bits of rubble—and, on the other side of that square-edged gap in the wall that might have been—no, really, surely was—a doorway, there was Aaron, turning around in delight to call to her: “Do you see, Nicky?
These aren’t just rocks. These were buildings! There was a time when people lived here!”
And, laughing, she called back, “Don’t get so excited, Airy. But, yes, I think so, too.”
In the three years they were married Nicole had re-ally loved Aaron Kammer. She remembered positively that that was true—well, up to a point. anyway. There were different kinds of love, surely.
There was the kind you dreamed of when you were fifteen and the teenage boys you knew, with their bruising kisses and clumsy hands, were simply an obstacle course you had to get through on the way to the Real Thing. The Real Thing was moonlit nights, warm breezes, you in a filmy dress with flowers in your hair and him tall and wise and tender. That was all fantasy, of course, especially for a spacer girl like Nicole2—you didn’t get moonlit nights in a habitat. But it was such a sweet and painful fantasy. Then there was the kind of love you hoped for when you were twenty, with a man who would put a child in your belly and share your work and your life, as well as your bed. How disappointing that that had turned out to be only fantasy, too, when you confronted the reality of the noisy, smelly, crowded little spaceship in midflight, with years behind you and years still to go.
It was a fact that when Nicole decided to switch hus-bands there was a lingering thought, in some part of her head, that Aaron’s were the kind of genes she would like her kids to have.
But that was just another fantasy. Like every other woman on the ship, she had continued to wear her fertility blocker, because what were they going to do with a bunch of babies on a ship that was already too small for its grown-up crew? Reluctantly, Nicole had concluded that there wasn’t any version of romantic love that could survive on a long-distance spaceship.
The thing about the present situation was that they weren’t on the spaceship any more.
There was another significant fact, though, and that was that they weren’t married any more, either.
That fact troubled Nicole—some. The man she had divorced to marry Aaron Kammer was her husband
,
again. The trou-bling part of that was that Nicole had a persistent conviction that married people should not love anybody but each other.
To divorce a man was supposed to mean that you stopped loving him. •
Yet here, on this cold, strange planet, it didn’t seem to be working out that way.
Aaron was different here, for one thing. He was alive again. She had never seen him so happy and so excited. Certainly he still coughed and his hands still trembled, be-cause he was still well into that process of dying. She knew that he was pushing his strength farther than it ought to go. But she couldn’t stop him, because he was so completely absorbed in this exploration, chipping off bits of rock and throwing them on the buggy, scraping soil off what might have been flooring, shouting with joy as he picked up a thing like a potsherd or uncovered a thing like a rusted blade. So all that time she followed him around with the camera, watching him, and her heart was melting inside her.
It was Nicole who insisted that they stop and rest a mo-ment. “And we have to eat something, too,”
she ordered.
Kammer looked at her in surprise. Then he reached out and touched her face—well, touched her mask, anyway; but it was a tender, tolerant kind of touch. “You know what you are, Nicky? You’re blasé. This isn’t exciting to you any more, is it?”
She said, grinning under the nose mask, “It’s no big thrill. You’ve put your hands on me plenty of times before this.”
He pulled his fingers back as though she had burned him. “No, I mean exploring. Coming to this place,” he explained. “You’ve done it all already, haven’t you? I mean, on Genji? But for me—”
He shook his head, delighted. Nicole said practically, “We still have to eat, you know.”
“Oh, sure,” he agreed, but his eyes were roving. He even tried to do, what she ordered, but it was impossible. He couldn’t make himself sit still. Long before she had finished chewing the last of the rations they had brought he was up again, circling the ruins, peering curiously into the stunted woods around them.
Nicole was not immune to the excitement of exploring Chujo, with its purply sky and the great crescent of Genji hanging off to one side. She was interested in what she saw, camera always busy, talking notes into her recorder about the sparseness of the birds (nothing like the flocks in Genji’s soupy air; flying was hard work on Chujo) and the absolute absence of any detectable animal life (but of course they would have hidden from strangers, with all the noise they were making). But she could have called it a day a lot sooner if she had not been so pleased to indulge Kammer’s delight. So she let her compassion outweigh her better judgment. They stayed a good deal longer than she had planned, but at last she called a halt. “Back to the !ander,– she ordered. “We have to report in next time the ship’s overhead. Besides, you’ve got to rest.–
“Just a little more—?”
“Now,” she commanded.
He pouted at her, then grinned. “You drive,” he said.
And while she was easing the buggy over the bumps and depressions on the way back down the hill, Kammer was loping around the margin of the forest, running back to the buggy with samples of leaves and fruits, never still, though she saw that his face was paling with fatigue.
In that reeking broad valley he dumped a load of the berry plants and she caught his hand. “Enough, Airy! We’ll come back here if you like—but I want you alive when we do it.”
He pulled free, trotting alongside the buggy, panting a little. –Well,” he said, “I suppose you’re right.
Look, I’ve got something for you.”
Carefully he pulled a little purple-blue flower out of his pouch and handed it to her. She looked at it and sniffed. It certainly didn’t smell like any flower she’d-ever seen from Earth; if it had any scent at all, it was more like ancient mold than rosebuds. “It’s pretty,” she said, guiding the buggy with one hand while she turned it in her fingers.
“It’s the prettiest one I’ve seen,” he told her: “I’m the discoverer, so I’m naming it after you.
Kammeria ni-colensia, or something like that.”
She stared at him, suddenly embarrassed. He grinned and said, “Hang on to it, Nicky. Now just let me go back and get a couple of other things from the woods there. I saw some shrubs—”
“Airy!” she called peremptorily. But he was already on his way, halfway to the forest edge.
,
Nicole cursed to herself, and then out loud as the buggy hit a tuft of tangled vegetation and jolted alarmingly. By the time she got it straightened out and looked back, she was startled to see that Kammer was sprawled on the ground in the middle of the field.
“Airy!” she shouted again, panic this time. She stopped the buggy and ran over to him. He was trying to stand up, hand pressed to his forehead. There was blood on his fingers. “What happened?” she demanded, helping him up.
He stared at her dnn’dly. “I—I don’t know. Some-thing hit me on the head.”
“What could hit you on the head?” she snapped—foolishly. Angrily. And then she heard something whiz through the thin air by them only centimeters away. “Oh, shit,” she snarled. “Let’s get out of here!
Somebody’s throwing rocks at us!”
Once they were in the lander Nicole felt safer—a little bit, anyway. With the port closed and the cut on Kammer’s head bandaged, she began to breathe more easily. It was a deep cut, and it bled a lot, but the bone wasn’t broken.
Then Aaron insisted on opening the port again so he could check the hold-downs on the external shelter, for fear of one of Chujo’s sudden windstorms—he explained that he knew better than Nicole what they might be like, being Martian. Then at last he was willing to lie down and rest while ‘she reported in to the ship. Yes, she informed the captain, there was definitely life on Chujo—animal life.
“Those trolls in the picture?” the captain asked.
Nicole shuddered, remembering the noseless, apelike face and the teeth. “I don’t know. I couldn’t see them,” she said, “but Airy claims he did.”
“Well, almost,” he called from the berth beside, her. “I just saw shadows, really.”
“Intelligent?” Nicole said, returning to Captain Wash-ington’s questions. “How do I know if they’re intelligent? They throw rocks, but so do apes. No, I think we’re safe enough here. I’ve got the sensors up, and there’s nothing moving within half a kilometer.”
“The trolls won’t come out of the forest,” Aaron put in.
She turned and frowned at him. “You don’t know that.”
“They didn’t follow me,” he pointed out.
She shook her head, but the captain was still speaking. “Well,’” he said, “if you say there are buildings there I’ll take your word for it.”
“Ruins, really,” Nicole corrected.
“Of course they’re just ruins. We know that much, don’t we? And the scans from your landing orbit—?”
Of course, they had left the external cameras on as they looped in’ for their landing. “Have you analyzed the data? Any good pictures?”
“13orilig,” her husband told her. “Well, there are def-initely buildings. More on starside than here, but all abandoned,”
“Well, then!” Nicole said. “We ought to have at least one more landing on starside, right?”
“Wrong. We’re going. I’ve already notified all the parties on Genji to stand by for pickup.”
“But at least look at the starside buildings—”
“No.” Nicole sighed. When Darryl Washington had made up his mind there was no changing him, right or wrong. Especially when he was wrong.
“Then at least let us see if we can find some animal life to bag.”
“Only if you can do it before local dark,” he said firmly. “Why bother? Animals are animals. If there ever was anyone civilized enough to build things on Chujo, they’re all dead now.”
“Except for the rock throwers,” Nicole said.
The radio was silent for a moment. “If you’re in any danger—” the captain began.
“We aren’t!” Kammer called emphatically.
“—just as a precaution, you have enough fuel to jump and land again somewhere else a few hundred kilometers away.”
“Negative!” Kammer said. “I want to see what’s here.”
More silence from the radio. Then, “I wish you’d taken some weapons,” the captain fretted.
“But we didn’t,” said Nicole. “Now I’m going to switch over to data transmission so you can see our pictures before you get below the horizon again. Talk to you later, after we get some—something to eat,”
she finished, chang-ing her mind. She had been about to say, “get some sleep.” But to say that, to her very jealous husband, had suddenly seemed tactless.
They hadn’t taken a food machine for just the two of them, so all there was in the larder was dehydrates and radiation-stabilized-fruits. Well, almost all. Nicole had at the last moment packed some precious, hoarded wine as a little surprise.
Aaron had been drowsing off and on while she was on the radio, and now he was sound asleep. She watched him carefully. He looked so tired. She tried to remember what he had looked like when she had come to the conclu-sion she was more in love with Aaron Kammer than the man she was married to.
He’d been good-looking then, be-fore he let himself get burned refitting the drive. Even now, she thought, Aaron had a good, strong, solid body, without all that disgusting blubber Darryl Washington had allowed himself to grow. Not to mention a lot better disposition. Not to mention his Well, his sweetness. Aaron Kammer had enough of that for export. Who else would make clothes for a cat?
Sweetness hadn’t been enough. And anyway, she thought, you can get really tired of sweetness.
When she woke him to say that dinner was ready, he blinked up at her contentedly. “How’s your head?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said, dismissing the subject. Lying about it, of course. “What’s this?” he asked, looking curiously at the pouch of wine, but amused because he knew the answer. “I didn’t know you had any wine left.”
