2312

“Maybe for you, oh sage one,” she said. “I never felt that way. Anyway, after that I lived on Venus for a while, working for Shukra. Then I designed terraria. Then I moved into making artworks, working with landscapes or bodies. Goldsworthies and abramovics, still very interesting to me, and how I make my living. So I’m out and about, following commissions. But I keep a room in Terminator. My parents both died, so my grandparents Alex and Mqaret were kind of like my parents. You couldn’t have made any critique of pair-bonding by looking at those two. Poor Mqaret.”

“No, I know,” he said. “It was child rearing I was talking about, that seems to take more than two people. You must have learned that too?”

She shot him a glance. “One of them is out there somewhere. The child I had with Zasha died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes, well, she was old. I don’t want to talk about that right now.”

In fact she was slowing down, and seemed to him hunched over. He said, “Are you all right?”

“Feeling weaker.”

“Do you want to stop and rest?”

“No.”

On they struggled, in silence.

He helped her through one hour, supporting her as she walked with one of his arms around her back and under her far arm, pulling up. After the rests she struggled up and continued walking, and would brook no argument against it. When they got to the next station, he looked around in every cabinet and closet in the place, and in the last closet he checked (but it was always the last one, when you found something) there was a little four-wheeled pushcart with a bar on one end that rose to chest height; otherwise it was a flatbed set just above wheel height, the bed one meter by two, and the two swiveling wheels opposite the bar.

“Let’s put our backpacks on here and I’ll push them,” he suggested.

She gave him a look. “You think you can push me around.”

“It would be easier than carrying you, if it came to that.”

She dumped her backpack on the cart, and the next morning took off ahead of him. At first he had to hurry; then he caught up with her; then he slowed down as she did.

Hour after hour. Without discussing it, she would sometimes sit on the cart. Up on the surface over them passed the craters and scarps named after the great artists of Earth; they went under Ts’ao Chan, Philoxenus, R m, Ives. He whistled “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” which Ives had incorporated so memorably into one of his wild compositions. He thought of R m

’s “I Died as Mineral” and wished he had it memorized better. “I died as mineral and rose as a plant, I died as plant and was born an animal; when did I ever lose by dying?”

“Who is that?”

“R m.”

More silence. Down the big curve of the tunnel. The walls here were cracked, and it looked like they had been heat-treated more than usual to fuse them to impermeability. Crazed glazes of black on black. Craquelure to infinity.

She groaned and stood up from the cart and walked back to the west. “One moment, I have to go again.”

“Oh dear. Good luck.”

After a long while he heard a distant groan, maybe even a forlorn “Help.” He went back down the tunnel, pulling the cart with him.

She had collapsed again with her suit down. Again he had to clean her up. She was a little more conscious this time, and looked away; even at one point batted weakly at him. In the middle of his work she looked at him blearily, resentfully. “This isn’t really me,” she said. “I’m not really here.”

“Well,” he said, a little offended. “I’m not either.”

She slumped back. After a while she said, “So nobody’s here.”

When he was done and she was dressed again, he got her on the cart and pushed her forward. She lay there without a word.

In the next break he got her to drink some water dosed with nutrients and electrolytes. The cart, as she said at one point, was beginning to resemble a hospital bed. From time to time Wahram whistled a little, usually choosing Brahms. There was a stoic resolution at the heart of Brahms’s melancholy that was very appropriate now. They still had twenty-two days to go.

That evening they sat there in silence. The scene devolved into the desultory animal behaviors that often followed such little crises-the turned heads, the preparations for sleep pursued abstractedly; dull aching drop into sleep, that unseen refuge. Here the pseudoiterative needed to be held to as a comfort. Lick one’s wounds. All these things had happened before and would happen again.

O ne morning she got up and tried to walk, and after twenty minutes she sat back on the cart again. “This is worrisome,” she said in a small voice. “If enough cells were busted…”

Wahram didn’t say anything. He pushed her along. Suddenly it occurred to him that she could die in this tunnel and there was nothing he could do about it, and a wave of nausea passed through him, making him weak in the legs. A stay in a hospital could have done so much.

After another long silence, she said in a low voice, “I suppose I used to enjoy risking death. The jolt of the fear. The thrill when you survive. It was a kind of decadence.”