2312

“I’m worried about that last solar flare we saw. By the time you see one of those, there’s faster radiation that’s come off the snap. I’m afraid we might have gotten cooked. I feel shitty.”

“I’m just sore. But then, you covered me at the elevator.”

“It probably hit us differently. I hope so. Let’s ask the ferals how they feel.”

They did at the next stop, where, by the looks on their faces, the sunwalkers had waited long enough to be concerned. Tron said, “How goes it?”

“I’m feeling sick,” Swan said. “How are you three feeling?”

They looked at each other. “All right,” Tron said.

“No nausea or diarrhea? No headaches or muscle soreness? No hair coming out?”

The three sunwalkers looked at each other, shrugged. They had gone down the elevator earlier.

“I’m not very hungry,” Tron said, “but the food isn’t very good.”

“My arm is still sore,” Nar offered.

Swan looked resentfully at them. They were sunwalkers, young and strong; they were doing what they did all the time, except underground and widdershins. She looked at Wahram. “What about you?”

Wahram said, “I’m sore. I can’t go much faster than I already am, or longer, or something will break.”

Swan nodded. “Same for me. I may even have to slow down. I feel bad. So I wonder if the three of you should hurry on ahead, and when you get to the sunset, or run into people, you can tell them about us.”

The sunwalkers nodded. “How will we know when we’re there?” Tron asked.

“In a couple of weeks, when you come to stations, you can go up in the elevator and have a look.”

“All right.” Tron looked at Tor and Nar, and they all nodded. “We’ll go get help.”

“That’s right. Don’t go out so fast you hurt yourselves.”

A fter that Wahram and Swan walked on their own. An hour walking, a half hour sitting, over and over for nine times; then a long meal and a sleep. An hour was a long time; nine of them, with their rests, felt like a couple of weeks. They whistled from time to time, but Swan was not feeling well, and Wahram did not want to do it on his own, unless she asked him to. She stopped and fell back in the tunnel from time to time to relieve herself; “I’ve got the runs,” she said at one point, “I’ve got to empty my suit.” After that she only would say, “Wait a minute,” and then, after five or ten minutes, catch up to him again, and on they would go. She looked desiccated. She became irritable and often spoke viciously to Pauline, and sometimes to Wahram too. Querulous, disagreeable, unpleasant. Wahram would get annoyed with how unfair she was, how pointless the unpleasantness she created out of nothing, and he would hike along speechlessly, whistling dark little fragments under his breath. In these moments he struggled to remember a lesson from his creche, which was that with moody people you had to discount the low points in their cycle, or it would not work at all. His creche had numbered six, and one had been moody to the point of bipolarity, and in the end this had been what caused the group to semi-disband, Wahram believed; he himself had been one of those least able to see that person in their whole amplitude. Six people had thirty relationships in it, and hex wisdom had it that all but one or two of these had to be good for a creche to endure. They hadn’t even come close to that, but later Wahram had realized that the moody one in the upper half of his cycle was one of the people he most missed out of the group. Had to recall that and learn from it.

Then a time came when ten minutes passed with Swan back down the hall, and she didn’t return; and then he thought he heard a groan.

So he went back and found her sprawled on the floor, semiconscious at best, with her spacesuit down her to ankles and her excretion obviously interrupted midcourse. And she was indeed groaning.

“Oh no!” he said, and crouched by her side. She had her long-sleeved shirt still on, but under it her flesh was blue with cold on the side that had been on the ground. “Swan, can you hear me? Are you hurt?”